DALLAS — As Stephanie Drenka celebrated Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month in a Dallas park, she was also feeling a bit anxious.
She looked around Sammons Park, which on May 6 was filled with traditional Asian dance performances and demonstrations. Drenka thought to herself that the event would make an easy target for someone looking to attack a large group of Asian American and Pacific Islander families.
On the same day, just a suburb away, a gunman parked his car outside a mall in Allen, pulled out an AR-15 and started to shoot into the crowd of shoppers.
Authorities have not officially determined a motive for last weekend’s attack that killed eight people, but are examining it as a possible hate crime due to the gunman’s neo-Nazi and racist content on social media as an indicator that he was targeting people of color.
The gunman made hate-filled posts about women, Jewish people and Black people and shared a picture of two tattoos he had, one of a swastika on the left side of his chest and one of the Nazi SS on his right upper arm.
Out of the eight people killed, four were of Asian descent. Among the seven people injured in the shooting are a 6-year-old Korean-American boy whose parents and brother were killed, and a man from India whose friend was killed. At least one injured victim is Black. At least four victims were Hispanic, as was the shooter. In one of gunman Mauricio Garcia’s social media posts, the Associated Press reported, he shared a meme of a Latino child at a fork in a road, with one direction labeled “act black” and the other “become a white supremacist.”
“I think I’ll take my chances with the white supremacist,” the shooter wrote.
Living in fear
Allen is about 20% Asian American or Pacific Islander, and Collin County has one of the fastest-growing Asian-American populations in Texas. The…
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