The husband who survived the shooting at an Atlanta spa that killed his wife says police officers treated him as a suspect rather than a bereaved victim – keeping him handcuffed for hours without saying that his wife was dead.
“They kept me at the police station for all this time, until they investigated who was responsible or what had happened,” said Mario Gonzalez during an interview with the Spanish news site Mundo Hispanico. “In the end, they told me that my wife had died.
“They knew I was her husband,” said Gonzalez. “So they told me that she was dead when I wanted to know before.
“I don’t know, maybe because I’m Mexican,” he said. “Because the truth is that they treated me very badly.”
Gonzalez and his wife, Delaina Ashley Yaun, 33, went to Young’s Asian Massage in their town of Acworth on Tuesday for a relaxing day and to take a break from raising their two young children.
He said he was in a separate room when the shooting started and he fled to safety.
Your wife never came out alive.
Outside, he said, he was handcuffed by the police and detained for more than two hours – the police did not tell him until the end that his wife had been killed in the massacre.
Another man, Robert Aaron Long, is in custody after confessing to the crime, officials said.
Gonzalez’s niece, Jessica Gonzalez, told the Daily Mail: “I think it was a racial issue. [Mario] he was the only one who was handcuffed.
“He kept asking, ‘Where’s my wife at? Where’s my wife? ‘”she said.” And no one would give him an answer. He didn’t get an answer until a few hours later. “
Yaun was among eight people shot to death in three massage parlors in the Atlanta area, starting with the Cherokee County salon, where she and her husband went.
“What I need now is support, because I have a boy and a girl,” said Mario Gonzalez to Mundo Hispanico. “They took the most valuable thing that I have in my life.
“At the very least, he deserves to die, just as all those people died,” said the man about Long.