Dallas hair salon shooting suspect had delusions about Asians, police say

The man suspected of opening fire in a hair salon in Dallas' Koreatown and wounding three women last week harbored delusions about Asian people since being in a car crash that involved an Asian man two years ago, authorities said on Tuesday.

The man suspected of opening fire in a hair salon in Dallas' Koreatown and wounding three women last week harbored delusions about Asian people since being in a car crash that involved an Asian man two years ago, authorities said on Tuesday. Police identified the gunman as Jeremy Theron Smith, 36, and said he has been charged with three counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Smith was booked early on Tuesday and is being held in Dallas County jail.

Since the crash two years ago, "Smith has had panic attacks and delusions when he is around anyone of Asian descent," Dallas Police Chief Eddie Garcia told reporters. The shooting on May 11 is being investigated as a hate crime by the FBI along with the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Texas and the civil rights division of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Police have said the shooter entered a hair salon in the Koreatown section of Dallas, opened fire and wounded the owner of the Hair World Salon, a stylist who worked there and a customer. All three were women of Korean descent. They were taken to a local hospital with non-life-threatening wounds. Garcia said investigators were able to piece together evidence linking Smith to a red Honda Odyssey minivan that was spotted at the scene of two other shootings targeting Asian businesses in the Dallas area.

Smith has not yet been charged in the two other shootings, which occurred last week and in early April, and investigators are still working on those cases, he said. The Texas incident echoed last year's Atlanta-area shooting spree that targeted women of Asian descent, sending waves of fear and distrust within the Asian American community.

Attacks against people of Asian descent have escalated as some politicians and pundits have encouraged Americans to blame China for the coronavirus pandemic. Images from the scene in Dallas circulated by authorities after the shooting showed a person believed to have been the gunman wearing black and carrying a large rifle while running across a parking lot outside the salon to a red minivan.

The Korean American community in the Dallas area ranks among the largest in the United States, according to the Pew Research Center, and Koreatown is the historic hub of the area's Asian and Asian American residents.

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)