While tens of thousands of revelers celebrated the Lunar New Year during a festival in Monterey Park last Saturday, undercover cops from the Monterey Park Police Department shuffled through the crowds, according to a report from LA MAG. Following a year in which anti-Asian hate crimes reached the highest levels ever seen in Los Angeles County, newly appointed police chief Scott Wiese didn’t want to take any chances. So in addition to having undercover cops monitoring the festival, he also had SWAT teams on the ready and uniformed patrol officers making the rounds.
As the festival wound down though, Chief Wiese relieved his SWAT teams and most of his patrol officers of duty for the night. By 10 PM only three rookie cops, all women in their 20s, remained on duty for the evening. Minutes later, a 72-year-old man wielding a modified mac-10 semi-automatic pistol opened fire at Star Ballroom, a dance studio on Garvey Avenue in Monterey Park, just around the corner from police headquarters and some of the neighborhood's most beloved restaurants.
The three rookie officers responded to the scene “within minutes,” according to the chief of police. When they arrived they reportedly found victims in the parking lot. What they didn’t find was a shooter. At some point after the shooting he fled the scene in a white van.
Twenty minutes later, again armed with a modified mac-10, the shooter walked into another dance hall in neighboring Alhambra. When 26-year-old Brandon Tsay first saw the gunman walk through the lobby doors he thought to himself, “[I’m] going to die here.” As the gunman “prepped his gun,” Tsay lunged at him with his two arms extended and eventually wrestled the firearm away from the gunman, as the 72-year-old fought back for approximately two minutes. "Something came over me, I realized I needed to get the weapon away from him…or else everybody would have died,” Tsay told Good Morning America.
The scuffle ended with Tsay telling the assailant to leave. A day later, when authorities caught up with the gunman 30 miles away in Torrance, CA the gunman shot himself before he could be taken into custody. Afterwards, L.A. County Sheriff Robert Luna said during a press conference that in his opinion, Tsay likely prevented another mass shooting.