Police: Shooter on the loose after killing 10 people near Los Angeles

An assailant killed 10 people and injured 10 people at a ballroom dance club in the Los Angeles area after the Lunar New Year celebrations as he launched a manhunt for a suspect in the latest mass shooting tragedy in the American community.

Capt. Andrew Meyer of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department said Sunday the injured were taken to hospitals and their condition ranged from stable to critical. According to him, 10 people died at the scene in the city of Monterey Park.

Meyer said that when officers arrived at the scene around 10:30 p.m., people “blew out of the scene screaming.”

The Lunar New Year celebration attracted thousands of people. Monterey Park is a city of about 60,000 with a large Asian population about 10 miles (16 km) from downtown Los Angeles.

It was the fifth U.S. mass shooting this month and the deadliest since 21 people were killed at a school in Uvalde, Texas, according to the Associated Press/USA Today database of U.S. massacres. The last violence happened two months after five. people were killed at a Colorado Springs nightclub.

Seung Won Choi, owner of Clam House, a seafood barbecue restaurant located across the street from where the shooting took place, told the Los Angeles Times that three men broke into his establishment and ordered him to lock the door.

People also told Choi that there was a shooter with a gun who had several bullets. Choi said he believed the shooting happened at a dance club.

Wong Wei, who lives nearby, told The Los Angeles Times that a friend of his was in the bathroom at the dance club the night the shooting started. When she came out, he said, she saw an armed man and three bodies.

The friend then ran away to his home around 11 p.m., Wei said, adding that his friends had told him that the shooter appeared to have fired a long-barreled shotgun indiscriminately. “They don’t know why, so they run,” he told the newspaper.

The shooting took place not far from where thousands of people attended the Lunar New Year celebrations. Saturday kicked off the two-day festival, which is one of the biggest Lunar New Year events in Southern California.

Videos posted on social media show people being loaded onto stretchers and placed in ambulances. Other photos show bloodied and bandaged victims being treated by Monterey Park firefighters in the parking lot.