According to documents released Friday, the two massage parlors targeted by a deranged gunman in Atlanta Tuesday had both been subjects of prostitution stings by police, despite claims to the contrary by Atlanta’s mayor.
“As far as we know in Atlanta, these are legally operating businesses that have not been on our radar,” Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said after the shootings. “Not on the radar of [the Atlanta Police Department].”
Between the two parlors, 12 people were arrested in the busts. The latest prostitution sting happened in 2013.
“Almost all the arrests came in undercover stings where an officer paid for a massage and an employee offered sex or a sex act for more money,” the Washington Post reported.
Police visited the two massage parlors 21 times, according to the records.
The prevailing narrative pushed by the political left is that the shootings, which left eight victims dead, six of whom were of Asian descent, were a “hate crime” against the Asian community. But the gunman, 21-year-old Robert Alan Long of Woodstock, reportedly confessed that he targeted the massage parlors because they fed into his own sexual addiction, not because of the race of those operating them.
The third massage parlor attacked by the lone gunman was in Cherokee County, and does not appear to have run afoul of the law the way the others did.
However, according to one report, all of Long’s targets “have detailed recent reviews on an online site that leads users to places that provide sexual services.”
Still, the political left is running with the racism narrative.
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris met with Asian American leaders in Georgia Friday.
Georgia State Rep. Bee Nguyen, a Democrat and the first Vietnamese American member of Georgia’s general assembly, described the shootings as the “intersection of gender-based violence, misogyny and xenophobia.”
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Pete D’Abrosca is a contributor at The Georgia Star News and The Star News Network. Follow Pete on Twitter. Email tips to dabroscareports@gmail.com.
Photo “Police Tape” by Tony Webster. CC BY-SA 4.0.
