By Corina Knoll, Jill Cowan, Victoria Kim and Edgar Sandoval

LOS ANGELES — It was a party to celebrate the Lunar New Year, and dance students gathered at a beloved studio in the heart of Monterey Park, California, once marketed as a city of dreams for Chinese immigrants newly arrived in America.

Attached to an Asian herbal store, the exterior of Star Ballroom Dance Studio was humble, its entrance off a parking lot marked by a small awning. Yet, its expansive dance floor attracted marquee teachers and high-level performers from around the world. It was considered a refuge for its clientele, many of whom were older Chinese Americans who had found a comfortable space to twirl and socialize. Emanating from its doors late at night was music fit for the waltz, fox trot, tango and more.

But Saturday (22) night, sometime after 10 p.m., a gunman strode inside and shattered any feeling of sanctuary.

Five men and five women were fatally shot and 10 more were injured before the gunman, police believe, left the scene and entered a second dance club in nearby Alhambra, where two patrons were able to disarm him before he fled in what investigators described as a white cargo van.

The drama came to an end on Sunday (22) afternoon, when after an hours-long manhunt, a SWAT team pinned that van in a parking lot in Torrance, some 30 miles from the scene of the shootings. Officers heard one shot as they approached the van, and discovered that the suspect had shot himself, Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said.

The man, identified as Huu Can Tran, 72, was pronounced dead at the scene.

“I’m here to report that the suspect responsible for this tragedy is no longer a threat,” Luna said.

The attack was the deadliest mass shooting in the United States since the massacre in Uvalde, Texas, in May, when 19 children and two teachers were killed, and the second major shooting in less than a week in California, after gunmen killed a family of six in Tulare County last Monday (16) in what police said was probably a gang-related slaying.

The killings Sunday occurred on the eve of the Lunar New Year, a significant holiday for Asian Americans that had drawn thousands of people out to celebrate in Monterey Park earlier in the day, with plans to continue Sunday. Neighbours would later be horrified to learn that what they thought had been the sound of celebratory fireworks was actually the explosion of gunfire.

Dozens of people were at the dance studio Saturday night, many of them facing a mirror as they performed a Chinese square dance, according to a student named Grace who was there and who said she had been dancing at the studio for about four years.

She said many people did not notice when the gunman first arrived. Then, a round of rapid-fire shots rang out. “No one dared to flee. We all got down to the ground, hiding wherever we could,” said Grace, who asked to be identified only by her English first name. She said the gunman appeared to run out of ammunition, left and then returned. “No one could get out,” she said.

People fled to the back, she said, trying to hide in the restrooms and in a room used for karaoke.

She said she heard at least 10 shots. “First time was five or six or seven in a row. And then he ran out of bullets and then he came back and kept shooting.” All told, the gunman was inside the studio for about five minutes, she said.

Jeff Liu, 62, had been standing near the entrance when the gunman entered, according to his daughter, Juno Blees. Liu was grazed by bullets on his shoulder and his back, she said.

Blees said her father told her the gunman had appeared to shoot indiscriminately at those inside, including a worker selling tickets at a booth.

Liu’s wife, Nancy, collapsed, and as of Sunday afternoon, the family did not know her location or condition, she said. “We called all of the hospitals, but we could not locate her.”

Monterey Park Police Chief Scott Wiese said the officers who arrived at the ballroom less than 3 minutes after the first call were among the youngest on the city’s force. The scene they encountered was “chaos,” he said, with dead and injured people inside the building and witnesses running out of the doors.

“My young officers did their job, searched for a suspect and then came back and had to deal with the carnage that was inside,” he said. “And it was extensive.”

Officials learned that the suspect had gone next to the dance club in Alhambra, Luna said, where he was disarmed by two community members who he said should be considered heroes.

“I can tell you that the suspect walked in there probably with the intent to kill more people,” he said.

After the alert for the white cargo van went out, tactical teams surrounded a vehicle matching that description in Torrance, Luna said. They pinned it with armoured vehicles, broke its windows and entered. Luna said evidence found in the van linked the man inside, who had shot and killed himself, to both crime scenes.

A handgun was recovered from the van, Luna said, adding that the weapon confiscated from the suspect in Alhambra, a magazine-fed semiautomatic assault pistol with an extended large-capacity magazine attached to it, was probably not legal in California.

Monterey Park, a city of about 60,000 residents, is more than 60% Asian American. Located about 7 miles east of downtown Los Angeles, it is considered a mecca for Chinese immigrants, a place where they could find comfort in the food and language of their birth land while putting down American roots for their children. With more space than Los Angeles’ Chinatown, it is a suburban enclave that a well-known developer once advertised as “the Chinese Beverly Hills,” and it remains a destination in the San Gabriel Valley, a region known for its immigrant populations and Asian and Latin cuisine.

On Sunday, families of the victims and others who have long gathered at the dance studio were trying to make sense of what had happened.

-New York Times