Atlanta Spa Shooting: Robert Aaron Long's church deletes FB and Twitter accounts, 'distraught' for his family
ATLANTA, GEORGIA: Crabapple First Baptist Church in Milton, Georgia, a southern baptist church attended by the Atlanta-area mass shooting suspect Robert Aaron Long, reportedly took down its social media and website in the wake of the attacks that left eight people dead on Tuesday evening, March 16.
As per a Newsweek report, as of Wednesday morning, March 17, the Crabapple First Baptist Church's Facebook and Twitter pages were no longer online. An Instagram page for the church was set to private, and its website was no longer available without private login information.
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Elders of the church have expressed their grief over the violence. "We are grieved to hear the tragic news about the multiple deaths in the Atlanta area. We are heartbroken for all involved," they said in a statement. "We grieve for the victims and their families, and we continue to pray for them. Moreover, we are distraught for the Long family and continue to pray for them as well."
Among the many posts on the church’s social media was a video of a more clean-cut Long from a few years ago, where he spoke about his baptism in the church. In the 2018 video, the 21-year-old was reportedly seen with a trimmed beard and glasses, wearing a button-down. In the video, he recalled how when he was in seventh grade, a speaker at a youth group told the biblical story of the prodigal son.
“As many of you may remember, when I was eight years old I thought I was becoming a Christian, and got baptized during that time. And I remember a lot of the reason for that is a lot of my friends in my Sunday school class were doing that,” Long says in the clip. “And after that time, there wasn’t any fruit from the root that is our salvation.”
As per the Daily Beast, he goes on to say: “The son goes off and squanders all that he has and lives completely for himself and then when he finds he’s wanting to eat pig food, he realized there’s something wrong and he goes back to his father and his father runs back to him and embraces him. And by the grace of God, I was able to draw the connection there and realize this is a story between what happened with me and God. I ran away living completely for myself, and he still wants me, and so that’s when I was saved.”
The shooting rampage at the three spas in the Atlanta area resulted in the death of eight people. The brazen attack, which took the lives of six women of Asian descent, stirred considerable outrage and fear in the Asian-American community. Long has reportedly been charged with eight counts of murder in connection with the attacks.
He told the police that he had a “sexual addiction” and had carried out the shootings at the massage parlors to eliminate his “temptation,” the authorities said on Wednesday, March 17. He also said that he had frequented massage parlors in the past and launched the attacks as a form of vengeance. All but one of the victims were women, the police said.