The man on the other end of the phone line sounded frantic.
“Yeah, I want to report,” the man said, gasping for air, “at the Monterey Park …”
“Yes?” the operator asked.
“Star Dance studio … somebody already reported?” the man said, his voice cracking.
“No, what’s going on, sir?” she asked.
“Somebody shooting a gun, shooting people, inside, inside the studio,” he said, in between breaths. “So, we just came out. …”
The caller described rushing out of the Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park with other dancers the night of Jan. 21, minutes after a gunman had started his rampage.
His call sometime after 10:20 p.m. was one of the first that night to report the attack that left 11 people dead and nine others injured — the worst mass shooting in Los Angeles County history.
The audio of the 911 calls received that night, released by the city of Monterey Park on Thursday, Feb. 2, in response to a California Public Records Act request by the Southern California News Group and perhaps other media, illustrate the terrifying moments surrounding the massacre.
The shooter, 72-year-old Huu Can Tran, would later appear at the Lai Lai Ballroom in Alhambra, still armed with a semi-automatic pistol, authorities said. There, an employee of the ballroom disarmed the gunman, who fled.
Hours later, police in Torrance would catch up to Tran, who shot himself to death inside a van in a strip mall parking lot, authorities said.
Now that he’s dead, the gunman’s motive may never be known.
That night, the first shots fired were likely in the parking lot.
“Somebody shot the windows,” said a man on the phone with a police 911 dispatcher.
The dispatcher pressed for details.
“I don’t know what happened,” the man said in a trembling voice.
He was sitting in his car with his girlfriend in the ballroom parking lot when a gunman walked up to them, firing through the windows of his car.
The man said his girlfriend was now unconscious.
“We…
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