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What We Know About the Victims in the Atlanta Shootings

Six of the eight people killed at Atlanta-area spas were women of Asian descent.

A vigil in the Chinatown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., on Wednesday remembered the victims of the Atlanta shootings, who included six women of Asian descent.Credit...Shuran Huang for The New York Times

Eight people were killed at three massage businesses in Atlanta and nearby Cherokee County on March 16. The suspect in the shootings, Robert Aaron Long, has been charged with eight counts of murder and one count of aggravated assault.

Six of the victims were of Asian descent, and two were white. Seven were women.

The authorities have identified those killed in the attacks as Soon Chung Park, 74; Hyun Jung Grant, 51; Suncha Kim, 69; Yong Ae Yue, 63; Delaina Ashley Yaun, 33; Xiaojie Tan, 49; Daoyou Feng, 44; and Paul Andre Michels, 54. Elcias R. Hernandez-Ortiz, 30, was seriously injured.

Here is what we know so far about the victims.

Hyun Jung Grant was an employee at Gold Spa in Atlanta. She spent most of her time working, rising early and returning late at night, according to her son, Eric Park. A single mother, she worried about helping her two sons with their college tuition and paying the rent and bills on the home they shared in Duluth, Ga.

She did not speak much about her job, preferring to tell people that she worked at a makeup store. “She didn’t want us to worry about her ever,” said Mr. Park, 20.

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Hyun Jung Grant with her sons, Randy Park, left, and Eric Park, when they were young.

On her free days, she liked to take Mr. Park and his older brother, Randy, 22, to the aquarium or the mall. They would usually end up at a Korean restaurant, sharing galbi or soondubu, a spicy tofu stew that Ms. Grant craved.

She was playful and fun and had a young spirit — she liked to say she had the mind of a young teenager, Mr. Park said. She enjoyed watching Korean dramas and whipped up bowls of kimchi jjigae. “As long as we were together, she was pretty happy,” he said.

The trio was close-knit, as the rest of their family lived in Korea and the brothers did not have a relationship with their father, Mr. Park said. Ms. Grant was a supportive mother who encouraged her sons to carve out their own futures.

Ms. Grant’s sons learned about the shooting from a Gold Spa employee’s daughter, but did not know their mother had died until late that night when a relative in Korea saw her name in a report.

“All I can think about is her,” Mr. Park said. “Looking at the news just gets me mad. That deputy saying the shooter had a bad day — how is that a bad day? To me it’s a hate crime no matter how it looked.”

Xiaojie Tan, the owner of Young’s Asian Massage in Acworth, Ga., where four people were killed, made her patrons feel at home and treated her friends like family, one longtime customer said. Ms. Tan died two days ahead of her 50th birthday.

One of her employees, Daoyou Feng, was also among those left dead.

Greg Hynson, the longtime customer of Ms. Tan, described her as “just the sweetest, kindest, most giving person.” He last saw her just days before the shootings, he said, when stopping by her spa to say hello.

Ms. Tan, whose friends called her Emily, was originally from China and had a daughter she was tremendously proud of, he said. Mr. Hynson, a former competitive weight lifter, had regular appointments for massages to ease his upper neck trauma, and he and Ms. Tan had been friends for years.

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Xiaojie Tan

“It just doesn’t seem real that she’s not around,” he said. When he heard about the shooting, he rushed to the scene and was horrified to see police lights flashing from a block away. “I was in a state of shock,” he said.

Ms. Feng, 44, had just started working at the spa in the past few months, Mr. Hynson said.

“They welcomed you,” he said. “If you were a friend of Emily’s, you were a friend of theirs.”

Ashley Zhang, a friend who was also a Chinese immigrant, said Ms. Tan worked long hours most days. “We’re here for opportunity,” she said. “We work so hard. We want the American dream to come true.”

Delaina Ashley Yaun was looking forward to a date with her husband. The couple chose a relaxing massage at Young’s Asian Massage in a modest shopping center outside of Atlanta — a spa she had never visited before, according to relatives.

She and her husband arrived shortly before the shooting began. She was killed, but her husband survived, locked in a nearby room as gunshots rang out, according to Dane Toole, Ms. Yaun’s half sister.

“He’s not OK,” Ms. Toole said about her sister’s husband. “He’s taking it hard.”

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Delaina Ashley Yaun, left, with her sister, Dana Toole.

Ms. Yaun, one of four siblings who grew up in the area, had worked as a server at a Waffle House restaurant. She raised a 13-year-old son as a single mother and had an 8-month-old daughter, family members said.

“It was just all about family,” Ms. Toole said. “Whatever we’d do, we’d do it together. It doesn’t seem real. I expect to see her walking through the door any minute. It just hasn’t quite sunk in yet.”

John Beck, 27, was Ms. Yaun’s manager at a nearby Waffle House and described her as “the most hard-working, most determined, most outspokenly good-hearted person I’ve ever met.”

She had been a server and grill operator at the Waffle House, Mr. Beck said, arriving in the morning blasting gospel music and often buying eggs and grits for homeless people who had no money for food. She was raising a son by herself, but she also kept a motherly eye on Mr. Beck, checking in regularly to make sure he was OK.

Her big dream, Mr. Beck said, was to get married. And last year, she did just that, marrying Mario Gonzalez, whom Mr. Beck said she had met at the Waffle House when he showed up as a customer. They soon had a daughter. It was “real love,” Mr. Beck said.

Paul Andre Michels, who was among those killed at Young’s Asian Massage, was one of nine siblings, his brother John Michels said.

“We did almost everything together,” said Mr. Michels, 52.

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Paul Andre MichelsCredit...Kennesaw Police Department, via Facebook

His brother, he said, was a businessman and a veteran of the U.S. Army infantry, where he served in the late 1980s. Paul Michels had been married for more than 20 years and was a Catholic as well as a strong political conservative, his brother said. He grew up in southwest Detroit and moved to Georgia about 25 years ago for work.

“My brother was a very hard-working, loving man,” Mr. Michels said.

Elcias R. Hernandez-Ortiz, the man injured in the Acworth attack, was making his way to a money exchange business next door to Young’s Asian Massage when shots rang out, his wife, Flor Gonzalez, said. Moments later, he desperately reached for his cellphone.

“I’ve been shot!” Mr. Hernandez-Ortiz told his wife, she later recalled. “Please come.”

Ms. Gonzalez, 27, said she rushed to the hospital that evening and was unable to see her 30-year-old husband until after midnight. Doctors told her that he had been wounded in his forehead, throat, lungs and stomach.

“Doctors told me he had been very lucky, but that he was still very grave,” she said. “He was lucky that the bullet didn’t penetrate his brain.”

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Elcias Hernandez-Ortiz

Ms. Gonzalez said she reminded her husband that next week the couple had been planning to celebrate their daughter’s 10th birthday, as a form of encouragement.

“I pleaded with him to keep fighting and that he has a family,” she said. “He loves his daughter a lot. He’s always been a dedicated father, very loving.”

Mr. Hernandez-Ortiz, who goes by Alex, moved to Georgia from Guatemala more than 10 years ago, his wife said, and worked as a mechanic. They had been married just as long.

“Many others died,” she said holding back tears, “and my heart breaks for them. Whoever did this is not human.”

Suncha Kim was an employee at Gold Spa. A grandmother who enjoyed line dancing in her spare time, she had been married for more than 50 years, a family member said. She had immigrated to the United States from Korea “to provide us a better education and better life,” said the family member, who asked not to be named for privacy reasons. “Just a regular American family and worked really hard.”

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Suncha Kim

Soon Chung Park, who also worked at Gold Spa, had lived in New York before moving to Atlanta, a son-in-law, Scott Lee, said in an interview. She had stayed close with her relatives, many of whom still live in New York and New Jersey.

Ms. Park’s family and friends remembered her as a generous and hardworking mother who put others before herself. “She was willing to sacrifice everything for her kids,” Mr. Lee said.

Born in South Korea, Ms. Park was a widow and the mother of five children when she settled in the United States in the 1980s. She immigrated with her son and four daughters and raised them in the New York City area while working various jobs, including selling jewelry.

She moved to Atlanta about 10 years ago and began working at Gold Spa in 2018. Ms. Park’s hours were long, said her new husband, Gwangho Lee. She worked seven days a week from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., he said, cleaning the facility and cooking meals for the spa’s employees.

Yong Ae Yue worked at Aromatherapy Spa in Atlanta. She moved to the United States from South Korea in the 1970s, coming with her husband, Mac Peterson, whom she had met while he was stationed in the Army. They had one son before moving to Fort Benning, Ga., and having another son, Mr. Peterson said.

She found work as a cashier at a grocery store outside of Fort Benning and the couple stayed there until getting divorced in 1982. Their families had been close — “She used to take my sister to the spa,” Mr. Peterson said — and they had kept in touch, having lunch together as recently as last summer.

“She was a good mother,” Mr. Peterson said. “She was always there for her kids.”

Reporting was contributed by Juliana Kim, Richard Fausset, Jack Healy, Inyoung Kang, Linda Qiu, Rick Rojas and John Yoon from Atlanta, Campbell Robertson from Pittsburgh, Sarah Mervosh from New York and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs from Tivoli, N.Y.

Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio is a national reporting fellow. She previously reported in her hometown of Los Angeles, as well as in New York City and Washington. More about Giulia McDonnell Nieto del Rio

Edgar Sandoval is a reporter with the National desk, where he writes about South Texas people and places. Previously he was a newspaper reporter in Los Angeles, Pennsylvania and Florida. He is the author of “The New Face of Small Town America.” More about Edgar Sandoval

Corina Knoll is a Metro reporter who focuses on narrative storytelling. She previously spent more than a decade with The Los Angeles Times where she contributed to two Pulitzer Prizes and helped investigate how a county sheriff’s secret list of problem officers obstructed justice. More about Corina Knoll

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