Pray for our country.
From The New York Times:
Gathered to celebrate a beloved former pastor, snapping photographs of their Sunday church luncheon, the members of the Irvine Taiwanese Presbyterian Church did not pay much attention, at first, to the 68-year-old stranger in their midst.
He had been there before, the man assured a receptionist, refusing in Taiwanese to fill out a form providing his contact information. Asked why he was locking the doors, he let his black shirt, emblazoned with what appeared to be the word “security,” speak for him. It was not until he opened fire with one of his two semiautomatic pistols that the crowd of 150 or so churchgoers, most of them retirees, took notice.
Only then, scattering in terror, did they realize that the doors to the multipurpose room at the suburban Southern California campus where they were meeting had been chained, nailed and super-glued shut.
On Monday, a day after the attack that killed one person and wounded five others, the authorities announced murder and attempted murder charges against David Chou, a Las Vegas man with a wife and child in Taiwan who had traveled to Orange County with a grievance against Taiwanese people. At a news conference, the Orange County sheriff, Don Barnes, called the mass shooting a “politically motivated hate incident.”
The shooting, the nation’s second in two days considered a hate crime, came as authorities in Buffalo were investigating a supermarket massacre that claimed 10 lives; the suspect in New York, a white teenager who livestreamed the assault, is accused of having driven across the state to kill Black people.
Sheriff Barnes said that Mr. Chou had apparently acted alone, setting an elaborate trap, although it was not clear why he had chosen this out-of-the-way church as a target. He said that investigators had found notes in Mr. Chou’s car, which was parked outside the church, that were proof of his “hatred of the Taiwanese people.”
