Who is Randy Park? Son of Atlanta shooting victim calls Robert Aaron Long's sex addiction claims 'bulls**t'
ATLANTA, GEORGIA: The son of one of the victims of Robert Aaron Long has come out to call 'bulls**t' on his claims of sex addiction.
In a crime spree that lasted three hours and spanned three massage parlors, Robert Aaron Long killed 8 people of which six were women of Asian descent. After these, he was on his way to Florida to target porn film locations when cops apprehended him. While he took responsibility for the shootings, he explained that he had a "potential sexual addiction".
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The Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office has identified those killed and injured at Young’s Asian Massage in Acworth, but the Atlanta police are yet to officially name the victims of the rampage at two local spas, Gold and Aroma Therapy.
Who is Randy Park?
Randy Park, 23, is the son of a victim who died at the Gold Spa shooting, Hyun Jung Grant. On the evening of the killings, Park received a call from the daughter of a survivor who had been next to his mother.
"You see this stuff in TV shows and movies," Park reportedly said. "It's surreal. But I have a younger brother that I have to take care of now, so as much as I want to be sad and grieve — and I am super sad — I have no choice but to move on. To figure out the whole living situation for probably the next year with my brother." Grant is his mom's married name, he added and said that he never knew his father.
Park and his mother were “very close,” he said. “I could tell her anything. If I had girl problems or whatever. She wasn’t just my mother. She was my friend." The young son goes on to praise his mother who he says loved "dancing and partying". "She would always try to convince me to go out. She loved going to clubs. She loved Tiesto. She was like a teenager," he said.
Unbelievable reality
The gun attacks carried by Robert Aaron Long sent shockwaves across the country. The shootings have also instilled fear in the community — so much so that police has upped patrol in the communities from New York to Chicago. "To be honest. I didn’t think it would happen to me,” he had said, noting that apart from the occasional slur he receives online, “nothing has happened to me personally — until now."
"Potential sexual addiction"
There is a lot of uproar over the fact that police are taking Long for his word that the killings were not racially motivated. Cherokee County sheriff’s captain Jay Baker told reporters, "He [Long] was pretty much fed up and kind of at the end of his rope, and yesterday was a really bad day for him, and this is what he did."
It’s insane to me that the Sheriff just casually says “He was fed up, at the end of his rope...yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did" about the killer pic.twitter.com/fNFMrvfoST
— Wu-Tang Is For The Children (@WUTangKids) March 17, 2021
According to reports, Long told investigators that "a sex addiction drove him to commit" the killings. Law enforcement officials said that he also "indicated" that he frequented the spas in the area. Park calls this explanation from Long's end "bulls**t".
He also directed a question to Long's family who is reported to have turned him in. "My question to the family is, what did y’all teach him? Did you turn him in because you’re scared that you’ll be affiliated with him? You just gonna scapegoat your son out? And they just get away scot-free? Like, no, you guys definitely taught him some s**t. Take some f**king responsibility."
A single mother of two who "worked her a** off"
Hyun Jung Grant had instructed her son that if someone asks, to tell them "she works at a makeup parlor," he said. He says that he didn't know what his mother did for a living for most of his life. There is ongoing speculation on whether sex work was going on at any of the locations targeted. According to a report in DailyBeast, the spas’ online presence suggests customers sought sexual services there.
"So that’s what I fronted to everybody. The truth was she worked at a massage parlor and I knew that for a fact because she admitted it to me after I looked it up online. I confronted her about it, because I was worried for her. It’s kind of shady. When I went there and saw it — I don’t want to say it was a bad-looking place, but it matched the image in my head that I was worried about."
She told him she was an elementary school teacher in Korea before coming to America for "regular immigrant reasons". "And here in America, she did what she had to do,” he said, adding that she "worked her a** off". “She was a single mother of two kids who dedicated her whole life to raising them."
Outpouring support
A GoFundMe page set by Park titled, 'In memory of HyunJungKim to support my brother & I', has raised $320,986 of the $20,000 goal in just 6 hours at the time of writing this article. The support has left him speechless who promises that "every cent of it will be used only in pure necessity".