California’s Half Moon Bay mourns shooting victims as suspect Chunli Zhao faces murder charges

A singing bowl held by a Buddhist monk was struck once for each of seven people shot dead in Half Moon Bay as residents gathered to grieve in a local church late Tuesday.

The rural town in northern California was shaken by the mass shooting on Monday in which the alleged gunman, 67-year-old Half Moon Bay resident Chunli Zhao, killed fellow Asian and Hispanic farmworkers.

More than 50 people sought solace in community during a multi-denominational service in a house of worship on a stretch of scenic Pacific Coast Highway.

Downtown, bouquets of flowers had been placed as an impromptu memorial in a plaza on a main street known more for tourists than tributes to victims of violence.

“This is a tight-knit community and an impact like this is devastating,” Alice Kope said as she left the vigil.

“It’s just so hard to understand why this keeps happening,” she said of gun violence.

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Kope, a native California resident of Korean descent, felt it even more troubling that the mass shooting was the second in just a few days in the state, with another older Asian man targeting others in his community.

“My Asian friends are all wondering what is going on,” Kope said.

“Elderly Asian men being the perpetrators of such violence makes no sense; and then the Lunar New Year starting it. A lot of us have so many questions.”

Sophie Li, a Chinese-American woman working in Shiki Japanese Cuisine restaurant in Half Moon Bay, was among those who laid blame on access to guns in the United States.

“Without a gun, we just argue,” Li said.

“I never thought they would carry a gun, and then shoot Chinese people; I can’t believe it happened that way,” she said of the Asian men identified as the shooters.

Residents of this small town just a short drive from San Francisco and Silicon Valley told of having their sense of safety shaken by the mass shooting and turned to one another for support.

“What happened yesterday in this community is devastating,” San Mateo County Sheriff Christina Corpus said at a press briefing.

“Many of the workers came to this country to work to provide for their families, instead yesterday, many of them lost family members.”

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Zhao was booked on suspicion of seven counts of murder and one count of attempted murder, jail records showed. He was expected to be formally charged on Wednesday, when he was due to make his first court appearance in Redwood City.

Officials have not yet released the names of the five men and two women who died, nor the one man who was injured. Some were Asian and others were Hispanic, and some were migrant workers.

Servando Martinez Jimenez said his brother Marciano Martinez Jimenez, who was a delivery person and manager at one of the farms, was among those killed. Servando Martinez Jimenez said his brother never mentioned Zhao or said anything about problems with other workers.

“He was a good person. He was polite and friendly with everyone. He never had any problems with anyone. I don’t understand why all this happened,” Martinez Jimenez said in Spanish outside his Half Moon Bay home.

Marciano Martinez Jimenez, 50, had lived in the United States for 28 years after arriving from the Mexican state of Oaxaca. Servando Martinez Jimenez said he is working with the Mexican consulate to get his brother’s body home.

Eamonn Allen, a sheriff’s spokesman, declined to answer questions about whether Zhao had any previous criminal history, saying: “there were no specific indicators that would have led us to believe he was capable of something like this”.

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But would not have been Zhao’s first fit of workplace rage, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. In 2013 Zhao was accused of threatening to split a coworker’s head open with a knife and separately tried to suffocate the man with a pillow, the Chronicle reported, based on court documents.

The two were roommates and worked at a restaurant at the time, and the man, identified as Jingjiu Wang, filed a temporary restraining order against Zhao that was granted but is no longer in effect. Wang could not be immediately reached, the Chronicle reported.

The sheriff’s office identified the first shooting location as Mountain Mushroom Farm. But California Terra Garden took over the business last year, company spokesperson David Oates said.

He did not know how long Zhao worked there, adding that he was one of 35 employees who had stayed on when ownership changed. Oates declined to provide details of the four slain workers.

The site of the second shooting was nearby Concord Farms. Owner Aaron Tung said in a statement that the farm was waiting for more information before it could comment.

Several farmworkers and their families lived in mobile homes at the mushroom farm where the four died and had been relocated to hotels and offered mental health and other support after the shootings, said Half Moon Bay Vice-Mayor Joaquin Jimenez.

He said the farm employs 20 to 30 Chinese and Latino workers, some of them in the country without legal permission.

“There’s a lot of fear,” said Jimenez, who is also the farmworker programme director for the Latino advocacy group ALAS. “So for them to come forward to ask for help is going to be very difficult,”

Thousands of farmworkers are employed in the broader San Mateo County, an area known for growing mostly flowers, peas, Brussels sprouts and fava beans. There are a few small mushroom growers in the area, said BJ Burns, president of the San Mateo County Farm Bureau.

California was still reeling from an attack in Monterey Park, just outside Los Angeles, that killed 11 and cast a shadow over celebrations of Lunar New Year, an important holiday for many Asian-American communities. Authorities are still seeking a motive for the Saturday shooting by 72-year-old Huu Can Tran.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said Tran, who had been arrested decades earlier for unlawful possession of a firearm, fired 42 rounds in the attack in Monterey Park. He later shot himself dead.

The new year has brought six mass killings in the US in fewer than three weeks, accounting for 39 deaths. Three have occurred in California since January 16, according to a database compiled by Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University.

The database tracks every mass killing – defined as four dead, not including the offender – in the US since 2006.

At an afternoon news conference, Governor Gavin Newsom said he met with Chinese farmworkers who heard the gunshots. Speaking through a translator, they said it was hard to comprehend what was happening, he said.

“They had never heard a sound like that,” he said.

The shooting was likely to leave some in the community fearful and searching for other work, he said.

“The trauma and the damage, the devastation, is felt for generations in some cases, communities being torn asunder no one feeling safe,” Newsom said.

The shootings in Half Moon Bay and Monterey Park followed the killing of a teenage mother, her baby and six others at a home in California’s Central Valley on January 16. Officials discussing the investigation mentioned a possible gang link to the killings.

Agence France-Presse and Associated Press