Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has filed notice that she will seek the death penalty and file hate crime charges against the spa shooter accused of killing eight people on March 16, 2021 in a shooting spree at three Atlanta-area spas. Robert Aaron Long, 21, of Woodstock, Georgia has been indicted by a grand jury in the murder of eight people, six of them Asian women.
Under the indictment, Long has been charged with four counts of murder, four counts of felony murder, five counts of assault with a deadly weapon, four counts of possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony and one count of domestic terrorism
According to the Associated Press, “The hate crime charges are based on actual or perceived race, national origin, sex and gender, according to online records. Georgia’s new hate crimes law does not provide for a stand-alone hate crime. After a person is convicted of an underlying crime, a jury must determine whether it’s a hate crime, which carries an additional penalty.”
AP notes that Willis, the alleged spa shooter was asked during her campaign last year if she would commit to not seeking the death penalty, a question to which she answered “yes,” so her seeking the death penalty for Long is significant.
More from AP:
Police have said Long shot and killed four people, three of them women and two of Asian descent, at Youngs Asian Massage near Woodstock just before 5 p.m. on March 16. He also shot and wounded a fifth person, investigators said.
He then drove about 30 miles (50 kilometers) south to Atlanta, where he shot and killed three women at Gold Spa before going across the street to Aromatherapy Spa and fatally shooting another woman, police have said. All of the Atlanta victims were women of Asian descent.
After the shootings at the two Atlanta spas, spa shooter Long got back into his car and headed south on the interstate, police said.
Long’s parents saw him in still images from security footage that the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office posted online. They notified authorities of his identity and provided cellphone information that eventually led to Long’s capture about 140 miles south of Atlanta.
Long reportedly told investigators that he had a sex addiction. Law enforcement delivered the narrative that race was not a factor in the shootings, saying Long had lashed out at the businesses because he saw them as a temptation. That narrative resulted in a loud and public outcry, especially when it was discovered that the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office Captain Jay Baker, who had delivered the narrative in the original press conference, had himself engaged in anti-Asian sentiments via the shilling of T-shirts made by a former colleague that mocked the coronavirus pandemic and its origins in China.
In that same press conference, Baker went on to say that Long was just having “a bad day.”
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