(Reuters) – Dallas police on Thursday searched for a gunman who entered a hair salon in the city’s Koreatown section and opened fire, wounding three women in an incident that carried echoes of last year’s Atlanta-area shooting rampage that targeted people of Asian descent.
The victims – the owner of the Hair World salon, a stylist who worked there and a customer – were all Korean women, according to reports by ABC affliate WFAA. They were taken to a local hospital with non-life-threatening wounds.
The unidentified suspect, described as a Black male with a thin build and standing between 5 feet, 7 inches and 5 feet, 10 inches tall, was dressed in black when he walked into the salon and began shooting on Wednesday afternoon, the Dallas Police Department said. The shooter then drove away in a minivan.
While authorities said they did not know the motive behind the gunfire, the incident recalled the shooting of eight people in Atlanta-area massage spas, six of whom were Asian or Asian-American women.
Those attacks heightened fears in Asian communities of violence inspired by anti-immigrant or anti-Asian sentiment, which has escalated in recent years, in part because of the perception that China was responsible for triggering the worldwide pandemic.
The statement from the Dallas police did not say how many shots were fired by the gunman.
Law enforcement circulated images from the scene that showed a person wearing black and carrying a large rifle while appearing to run out of a parking lot.
A police spokesperson said there was no update on Thursday on the condition of the three women who were shot.
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.
(Reporting by Tyler Clifford; Editing by Andrea Ricci)
