Georgia prosecutors affirmed on Monday their goal of seeking the death penalty in Atlanta’s Fulton County for the suspect accused of murdering four people at Asian-run day spas there, characterizing the shootings as hate crimes.
The accused, Robert Aaron Long, had been scheduled to be arraigned on Monday on the four Fulton County murder counts and other costs, but that was postponed until late September.
Long, 22, is accused of killing a complete of 8 human beings, almost all of them of Asian descent, in a sequence of attacks on 3 spas in or near Atlanta on an unmarried day in March. He has already pleaded responsible for https://www.reuters.com/global/us/man-pleads-guilty-4-murders-atlanta-vicinity-spa-shootings-2021-07-27 for the four slayings in Cherokee County, north of Atlanta, and was sentenced to life in jail.
In a hearing on Monday before Fulton County superior court docket judge Ural Glanville in Atlanta, prosecutors affirmed that District legal professional Fani Willis had filed court papers declaring her aim to look for the loss of life penalty and designating the case as a hate crime primarily based on race or gender.
He sported near-cropped hair instead of the mohawk he had worn in a preceding court appearance. By and large, he sat in silence during the listening. He quietly spoke back “sure, sir” when asked if he understood what he was listening to.
The March assaults galvanized an awareness of a wave of anti-Asian bias and violence across the United States throughout the coronavirus pandemic, which is assumed to have originated in China.
In a court docket listening to in Cherokee County last month, a lengthy confirmed little emotion as he defined how he bought a firearm and a bottle of bourbon and got down to kill himself, claiming to feel remorseful for a self-proclaimed intercourse addiction.
As an alternative, he stated he was determined to perform the spa shootings. Afterwards, he drove about 30 miles (50 km) south to Atlanta and attacked different spas run by human beings of Asian descent, prosecutors say, killing 8 humans in the county.
lengthy acquired 4 sentences of existence in jail without parole last month for the shootings of Delaina Ashley Yaun, 33; Paul Andre Michels, fifty-four; Xiaojie Yan, forty-nine; and Daoyou Feng, 44.
In Fulton County, he is charged with the killings of Yong Ae Yue, sixty-three; quickly Chung Park, seventy-four; Suncha Kim, 69; and Hyun Jung Park, 51, at Atlanta day spas.
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