Dallas police have arrested a suspect in a shooting that injured three women at an Asian-run hair salon last week, while the FBI opened a federal hate-crime investigation into the attack.
Police initially said they had determined that the shooting was not a hate crime but later said it may have been motivated by racism. Two other recent shootings at Asian-run businesses in Dallas have led investigators to conclude that the three assaults might have been connected, García said Friday.
The U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of Texas and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division are helping with the FBI’s probe, said Melinda Urbina, a spokeswoman for the FBI’s Dallas field office.
“We are in close communication with Dallas Police and are partnering together to thoroughly investigate this incident,” Urbina said Tuesday in a statement. “As this is an ongoing investigation, we are not able to comment further at this time.”
The launch of a federal investigation follows a request for help that García said Dallas police made last week “out of an abundance of caution.” Hate crimes against Asian Americans have soared during the pandemic amid warnings from advocates that former president Donald Trump’s framing of the coronavirus as “the Chinese virus” was contributing to the violence.
The Dallas shooting also came days before a gunman killed 10 people at a supermarket in a majority-Black neighborhood of Buffalo. FBI Director Christopher A. Wray called the attack “a hate crime and an act of racially motivated violent extremism.” Another person was fatally shot Sunday in a southern California church congregation in what law enforcement called an act of anti-Taiwanese hate.
In Dallas, officers responded Wednesday to the shooting at Hair World Salon in the city’s Koreatown and rushed two Asian American employees and an Asian American customer to a hospital with injuries that were not life-threatening. The gunman, dressed all in black, had fled in a maroon minivan, police said. Four other people inside the salon were not hurt.
Officers investigating last week concluded that the incident might have been connected to two other shootings involving red vehicles. In the first shooting, García said, a person in a red minivan fired shots April 2 as they drove past a strip mall with Asian-run businesses near Hair World Salon. No one was hurt.
Then, on May 10, someone drove a burgundy van or car past an Asian-run business in a different neighborhood and fired into the building, police said. Three people in the back of the business were not injured.
“When you connect those dots, you have you to start leaning towards, this may be motivated by something other than just a random act,” García said.
