Minutes after he had already killed 10 people and injured at least 10 more at the first dance hall, the gunman appeared intent on shooting more people, according to the man who has been hailed as a hero for disarming the Monterey Park shooter at a second dance hall in the neighbouring city of Alhambra.
“He didn’t seem like he was here for any money. He wasn’t here to rob us. When he was looking around the room, it seemed like he was looking for targets, people to harm,” Brandon Tsay, 26, said of the shooter in an interview Monday with ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
“From his body language, his facial expression, his eyes, he was looking for people,” Tsay told The New York Times.
Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said Sunday the weapon recovered at the Alhambra dance hall was a “semi-automatic assault pistol” with an extended large-capacity magazine attached.
Tsay told the Times he had never seen a gun before but could tell this one was particularly deadly.
When he saw it, “something came over me,” he said on “Good Morning America.”
“I realized I needed to get the weapon away from him. I needed to take this weapon, disarm him, or else everybody would have died.”
Tsay said he lunged at the shooter “with both my hands” before he grabbed the weapon and the pair fought for control of it. The struggle was captured in surveillance images obtained by ABC.
“We struggled into the lobby, trying to get this gun away from each other,” Tsay told the network. “He was hitting me across the face, bashing the back of my head. I was trying to use my elbows to separate the gun away from him, creating some distance.”
Tsay told the Times that he snatched the rifle just as the shooter looked down at it and removed one hand from it, perhaps getting ready to fire.
Tsay told ABC that once he had the gun in his hands, he had to threaten to shoot the man in order to get him to leave. He said, “Finally, at one point, I was able to pull the gun away from him, shove him aside, create some distance, point the gun at him, intimidate him, shout at him and say, ‘Get the hell out here. I’ll fire! Step aside. Go!’ And at this moment, I had assumed he would flee, but instead, he was just standing there debating whether to engage in combat or flee. I genuinely believed I would have
Tsay claimed that the shooter turned and ran back to his white van while still holding the pistol, adding that he “immediately contacted police.”
The shooter was eventually found dead on Sunday from a self-inflicted gunshot wound after a 30-mile-long manhunt. Luna told reporters on Sunday night that the reason for the dance hall attack is still a mystery.
Tsay claimed that he was in shock following the incident and that when he woke up on Monday, he had bruises on the back of his head and the side of his face.
According to him, he hopes the Monterey Park neighbourhood and the victims “may find the bravery and the strength to persevere.”
