ATLANTA – Randy Park said he learned of his mother’s murder while playing his favorite video game, League of Legends, at their town hall in Duluth, Georgia.
It’s a short drive from the spas in Atlanta, where police say 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long shot and killed four Asian women shortly after shooting four other people in a suburb north of the city, two of those victims also Asian women. While the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office has identified the dead and injured at 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 at Gold Spa next to his mother, Hyun Jung Grant, when the shooting took place.
“You see this stuff in TV shows and movies,” Park told The Daily Beast. It’s unreal. But I have a younger brother that I have to take care of now, so as much as I want to be sad and sad – and I’m super sad – I have no choice but to move on. To work with my brother to find out the entire living situation for probably the coming year. “
She was a single mother of two children who have devoted her entire life to parenting.
Randy Park
Atlanta police 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 girl problems or whatever. She wasn’t just my mom. She was my girlfriend. “
She liked to “dance and party,” he added. ‘She was always trying to convince me to go out. She loved going to clubs. She loved Tiësto. She was just a teenager. “
Grant is her married name, he added. Park never knew his father.
Every night before she left for work, they went to eat sushi at the Haru Ichiban on Satellite Boulevard, Park added. “It’s expensive, but it’s the best place around,” he said.
The shootings have sparked fear in the Asian-American community, which has endured a wave of racist violence over the past year as the coronavirus pandemic swept the country and right-wing figures of Donald Trump banned the outbreak.
Park said he was now looking at the problem through a completely different lens.
“To be fair. I didn’t expect it to happen to me,” he said, noting that aside from the occasional slur he comes across online, “nothing has happened to me personally – until now.”
Much of the national talk about the shooting has focused on Cherokee County sheriffs apparently taking the suspect, a suburban white boy, to his word that he wasn’t motivated by racial animus. Those dynamics only got worse when, as The Daily Beast first reported, it was revealed that the highly official in that department perpetuated those narrative racist t-shirts aimed specifically at the Asian-American community.
Rather than racism, law enforcement officials have said, the suspect has suggested that he was motivated by his addiction to sex. Atlanta police said on Thursday that he visited the spas he attacked.
Park does not buy that explanation for a second.
“That’s bullshit,” he told The Daily Beast.
“My question to the family is: what have you all taught him?” he added. Did you report him because you’re afraid you’ll be connected to him? Are you just going to make your son a scapegoat? And they just get away freely? No, you sure taught him some shit. Take some damn responsibility. “
The Long family was not immediately available for comment.
Park did not know what his mother did for the job for much of his life, and the explanation the suspect gave – coupled with the work of Internet sleuths – has sparked a conversation about whether sex work continued at one of the intended locations. .
The online presence of the spas suggests that clients sought sexual services there. They all have reviews or apparent ads on sites such as Rubmaps, BedPage, AdultSearch, RubRatings, EscortsAds, and / or The Erotic Review. Messages for Gold’s Spa in particular highlighted the ‘Latina & Blonde & Asian girls’.
But Park said he was protected from such a thing by his mother.
“She would always tell me if anyone asks that she works in a makeup salon,” he said. So that’s what I suggested to everyone. The truth was she worked in a massage parlor and I knew it for sure because she admitted it to me after I looked it up online. I confronted her because I was worried about her. It’s kinda seedy. When I went there and saw it – I don’t want to say it looked bad, but it matched the image in my head that I was worried about. “
Park said his mother “worked very hard”, telling him she was an elementary school teacher in Korea before coming to America for “mainstream immigrant reasons”.
“And here in America she did what she had to do,” he said. “She was a single mother of two who devoted her whole life to parenting.”
Park said he tried unsuccessfully to get to the scene of the crimes in Atlanta, and that he still had not been contacted by the local police. He did say he got a call from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and in fact he seemed to get another while this reporter was in attendance Thursday.
“I had to call the medical examiner to find out the body retrieval situation, which I don’t want to talk about right now,” he added. ‘I really want to let my mom rest. I don’t want to do anything else. “