Seven people were killed in a mass shooting at two locations in the coastal northern California city of Half Moon Bay on Monday.
The shooting in Half Moon Bay, about 50km (30 miles) south of San Francisco, comes after another mass shooting in the southern California city of Monterey Park on Saturday that killed 11 people.
[ Monterey Park shooting: ‘No one dared flee. We hid wherever we could’ ]
The accused gunman, identified as Chunli Zhao (67), was taken into custody a short time later after he was found sitting in his vehicle, parked outside a sheriff’s station, where authorities said they believe he had come to turn himself in.
A semi-automatic handgun was found in his car, San Mateo County Sheriff Christina Corpus told an evening news conference.
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Corpus said the suspect, who was “fully cooperating” with investigators following his arrest, had worked at one of the two crime scenes.
California governor Gavin Newsom said he was visiting Monterey Park victims in the hospital when he was called away and informed of the shooting in Half Moon Bay, about 610km to the north. “Tragedy upon tragedy,” Mr Newsom said on Twitter.
San Mateo County sheriff Christina Corpus called the shooting sites nurseries, and other officials said they were staffed by farm workers. Local media described at least one of them as a mushroom farm. A motive had yet to be established, Ms Corpus said.
“There were farm workers affected tonight. There were children on the scene at the incidents. This is a truly heartbreaking tragedy in our community,” San Mateo County supervisor Ray Mueller told reporters. “The amount of stress that’s been on this community for weeks is really quite high.”
The rural area was recently pounded by a series of heavy rainstorms that caused extensive damage, affecting immigrant labourers in the area, farmworker advocates said.
Deputies responding to a call found four people dead and a fifth victim with life-threatening wounds at the first location in Half Moon Bay, then found three more dead at another place nearby, Ms Corpus told a news conference.
Video on ABC 7 from the Bay Area showed the arrest as two men in plainclothes and one uniformed deputy, guns drawn, ordered the man out of his car. The suspect came out, was thrown to the ground and searched for weapons.
The description of the suspect’s car and licence plate were already circulating among law enforcement when a deputy spotted the car in the parking area, Ms Corpus said.
There were 38 mass shootings in the United States in the first 21 days of the year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which describes a mass shooting as four or more people shot or killed, not including the shooter. – Reuters