ATLANTA – Randy Park said he learned of his mother’s murder while playing his favorite video game, League of Legends, at his residence in Duluth, Georgia.
It is a short drive from Atlanta spas, where police say 21-year-old Robert Aaron shot and killed four Asian women shortly after shooting and killing four other people in a suburb north of the city, two of those victims too. Asian women. Although the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office identified the dead and injured at Young’s Asian Massage in Acworth, Atlanta police have not officially identified the victims of the violence at two local spas, Gold and Aroma Therapy.
But Park, 23, said he received a call that night from the daughter of a survivor who was next to his mother, Hyun Jung Grant, at Gold Spa when the shooting occurred.
“You see these things on TV shows and movies,” Park told The Daily Beast. “It is surreal. But I have a younger brother that I need to take care of now, as much as I want to be sad and suffer – and I’m super sad – I have no choice but to move on. To find out the whole life situation probably next year with my brother. “
“She was a single mother of two who devoted her entire life to raising them.“
– Randy Park
The Atlanta Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on this story. Grant’s name first appeared in The Korea Times Atlanta.
Park and his mother were “very close,” he said. “I could tell her anything. If I had problems with girls or something. She was not just my mother. She was my friend. “
She loved to “dance and party,” he added. “She always tried to convince me to leave. She loved going to clubs. She loved Tiesto. She looked like a teenager. “
Grant is her married name, he added. Park never met his father.
Every night, before she left for work, they went to eat sushi at Haru Ichiban on Satellite Boulevard, Park added. “It is expensive, but it is the best place around,” he said.
The shootings increased fear in the Asian-American community, which withstood a wave of racist violence last year when the coronavirus pandemic hit the country and figures on the right of Donald Trump sparked the epidemic.
Park said he was now looking at the problem through very different lenses.
“To be honest. I didn’t think this was going to happen to me,” he said, noting that, in addition to the occasional slander he encounters online, “nothing has happened to me personally – until now.
Much of the national conversation about the shooting has centered on the sheriffs in Cherokee County apparently taking the suspect, a white boy from the suburbs, for his word that he was not motivated by racial animus. This dynamic was only worsened when, as The Daily Beast first reported, it was revealed that the department’s own officer perpetuating that narrative posted racist t-shirts that specifically targeted the Asian American community.
Instead of racism, police officials said, the suspect suggested he was motivated by his addiction to sex. Atlanta police said on Thursday that he frequented the spas he attacked.
Park does not accept this explanation for a second.
“This is bullshit,” he told The Daily Beast.
“My question to the family is: what did you teach him?” he added. “Did you hand it over because you are afraid to be affiliated with it? Are you just going to take your son off the scapegoat? And do they just get away with it? Like, no, you definitely taught him some shit. Take the fucking responsibility. “
The Long family could not be reached for comment.
For much of his life, Park did not know what his mother did for work, and the suspect’s explanation – along with Internet detectives’ work – sparked a conversation about whether sex work took place in any of the targeted locations.
The online presence of the spas suggests that customers sought sexual services there. They all have apparent comments or ads on sites like Rubmaps, BedPage, AdultSearch, RubRatings, EscortsAds and / or The Erotic Review. Posts for Gold’s Spa, in particular, emphasized their “Latin, blonde and Asian girls”.
But Park said he was protected from anything like that by his mother.
“She always told me, if anyone asked, that she works for a makeup artist,” he said. “So this is what I did for everyone. The truth is that she worked at a massage parlor and I knew that because she admitted it to me after I researched it online. I confronted her about it, because I was worried about her. It’s kind of dark. When I went there and saw it – I don’t mean it was an ugly place, but it matched the image in my head that worried me. “
Park said his mother “worked hard” and that she told him she was an elementary school teacher in Korea before coming to America for “regular immigration reasons”.
“And here in America, she did what she had to do,” he said. “She was a single mother of two who has devoted her entire life to raising them.”
Park said he tried unsuccessfully to go to the Atlanta crime scene and that he had not yet been contacted by the local police. He said he received a call from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and, in fact, appeared to receive another while the reporter was present on Thursday.
“I had to call the coroner to find out the situation in which the body was rescued, which I don’t want to talk about now,” he added. “I really just want to put my mom to rest. I don’t want to do anything else ”.