Sunday marks one year since a gunman opened fire at a Lunar New Year celebration at the Star Ballroom in Monterey Park, killing 11 people and injuring nine more.
Community members are still grieving the loss of innocent lives, including Kevin Leung, a Kung Fu instructor at Star Ballroom who had to explain the tragedy to his young students.
A year later, he says the students are doing well thanks to the help of their families.
“We’ve been very fortunate to have a lot of support from the families and also the different members of the community,” Leung told KTLA 5’s Annie Rose Ramos. “We actually were taken in by some of them [who gave] us a home, and it helped us have that conversation and help [the students] feel safe, and that was really important.”
Star Ballroom has remained closed since the massacre, and Leung believes it will stay that way for now.
“I think that, especially for a lot of Asian folks, it’s still a sensitive spot,” he said. “Even though they had the Buddhist ceremony to let the dead move on, [people] look at this place and still feel that little sense of uneasiness, and I think that still weighs heavily on people’s minds.”
A candlelight vigil remembering the victims is scheduled for 6 p.m. Sunday at the Monterey Park City Hall Front Lawn. For more information, click here.
The perpetrator of the deadliest mass shooting in Los Angeles County history was identified as 72-year-old Hemet resident Huu Can Tran.
Tran entered the Lai Lai Ballroom in nearby Alhambra 20 to 30 minutes later armed with a semi-automatic pistol that had an extended large capacity magazine “probably with the intent to kill more people,” L.A. County Sheriff Robert Luna said at the time.
A 26-year-old man named Brandon Tsay disarmed him when he entered the dance hall, saving countless lives.
After a standoff with law enforcement, Tran died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound roughly 25 miles from the scene.