Man charged with killing 8 people at Georgia massage parlors

(AP) — A white gunman has been charged with killing eight people at three Atlanta-area massage parlors in an attack that sent terror through the Asian American community.

Robert Aaron Long told police that the attack wasn’t racially motivated, claiming to have a “sex addiction.” Authorities said Wednesday that he apparently lashed out at what he saw as sources of temptation.

But those statements spurred outrage and widespread skepticism given the locations and that six of the eight victims were women of Asian descent. The Asian American community saw the shootings as an attack on them, given a recent wave of assaults that coincided with the spread of the coronavirus across the United States.