ATLANTA: Randy Park said he learned of his mother’s murder while playing his favorite video game, League of Legends, at his home in the city of Duluth, Georgia.
It is a short drive from the Atlanta spas, where police say Robert Aaron Long, 21, killed four Asian women shortly after killing four people in a suburb north of the city. ‘these victims also Asian women. Although the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office has identified the dead and injured in Young’s Asian massage in Acworth, Atlanta police have not officially named the victims of the disaster 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 had been 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 simply came to our notice then. But I have a little brother that I have to take care of now, so so much so that he wants to be sad and sad — and I’m super sad, I have no choice but to move on. To find out the whole life situation for next year with my brother ”.
“She was a single mother of two who devoted her whole life to raising them.”
– Randy Park
The Atlanta police department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the story. Grant’s name first appeared in The Korea Times Atlanta.
Park and his mother were “very close,” he said. “I could tell him anything. If I had girl problems or whatever. It wasn’t just my mom. She was my friend. “
He loved to “dance and party,” he added. “I would always try to convince myself to leave. He loved going to clubs. He loved Tiesto. She was like a teenager. ”
Grant is his married name, he added. Park never met his father.
Every night before he left for work, they would go for sushi at Haru Ichiban on Satellite Boulevard, Park added. “It’s expensive, but it’s the best place,” he said.
The shootings have sparked fear in the Asian-American community, which has weathered a wave of racist violence over the past year, as the coronavirus pandemic swept the country and Donald Trump’s right-wing figures provoked the outbreak.
Park said he was now looking at the problem with a very different lens.
“To be honest. I didn’t think it would happen to me,” he said, noting that apart from some insults he finds online, “nothing has happened to me personally, so far.”
Much of the national conversation about the shooting has focused on Cherokee County sheriffs who apparently took the suspect, a white boy from the suburbs, in his word who was not motivated by a racial animus. This dynamic only worsened when, as first reported by The Daily Beast, the same officer was revealed in this department who perpetuated the narrative with racist T-shirts aimed specifically at the Asian-American community.
Instead of racism, police authorities have reported, the suspect has suggested he was motivated by his sex addiction. Atlanta police said Thursday they frequented the spas they attacked.
Park doesn’t buy that explanation for a second.
“That sucks,” he told The Daily Beast.
“My question to the family is, what have you all taught them?” added. “Did you hand it over because you’re afraid to join? Did you just kick your son out? And they just escaped? Like no, you definitely taught him shit. He assumes a fucking responsibility.
The Long family could not be contacted immediately for comment.
For much of his life, Park did not know what his mother did for the job, and the explanation offered by the suspect, along with the work of Internet detectors, sparked a conversation about whether the job sexual intercourse continued in any of the target sites.
The online presence of spas suggests that customers were looking for sexual services there. They all have reviews or apparent ads on sites like Rubmaps, BedPage, AdultSearch, RubRatings, EscortsAds and / or The Erotic Review. Gold’s Spa publications highlighted in particular her “Latin and blonde and Asian girls.”
But Park said his mother had protected him from all of this.
“He always told me if anyone asked me who works in a makeup salon,” she said. “So that’s what I faced everyone. The truth was that I worked in a massage parlor and I knew it in fact, because he admitted it to me after looking for it online. I faced it because I was worried about her. It’s a little gloomy. When I went there and saw it, I don’t mean it was a bad place, but it matched the image of my head that worried me. “
Park said her mother “took her ass off” and told her she was an elementary school teacher in Korea before coming to America for “regular immigrant reasons.”
“And here in America, he did what he had to do,” he said. “She was a single mother of two who devoted her whole life to raising them.”
Park said he tried unsuccessfully to go to the crime scene in Atlanta and had not yet been contacted by local police. He said he had received a call from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and in fact appeared to have received another while that journalist was present on Thursday.
“I had to call the forensic doctor to find out the recovery situation of the body, which I don’t want to talk about right now,” he added. “I really just want to put my mother to rest. I don’t want to do anything else. “