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The son of an Atlanta-area shooting victim says he's not buying the suspect's sex addiction excuse

Ashley Collman   

The son of an Atlanta-area shooting victim says he's not buying the suspect's sex addiction excuse
  • The Daily Beast spoke to Randy Park, whose mother was among the victims at Gold Spa.
  • When asked about the suspect blaming the killings on his sex addiction, Park said "that's bulls---."
  • He also attack the family of suspect Robert Aaron Long, who helped authorities catch him.

The son of one of the victims in the Atlanta-area shootings told The Daily Beast that he does not accept the suspect's explanation for the mass killing - that he has a sex addiction and the massage parlors targeted were a temptation.

"That's bulls---," Randy Park, 23, told the outlet on Thursday.

Park's mother, 51-year-old Hyun Jung Grant, was among the eight victims killed in Tuesday's shootings, six of them Asian women. Officials in Georgia confirmed her name alongside three others on Friday morning.

He said she was killed at Gold Spa, one of the two massage parlors in Atlanta. The third spa was some 30 miles outside the city.

Park told the Beast that he learned of his mother's death while at home playing video games. He got a call from the daughter of someone who had survived the attack, he said.

He said he and his mother were "very close." She was a single mom, and her death has left Park to care for his younger brother, the report said.

"You see this stuff in TV shows and movies," Park told The Daily Beast. "It's surreal. But I have a younger brother that I have to take care of now, so as much as I want to be sad and grieve - and I am super sad - I have no choice but to move on. To figure out the whole living situation for probably the next year with my brother."

Park expressed anger at the alleged gunman's family, who turned him into police after recognizing him in a bulletin about the suspect.

"My question to the family is, what did y'all teach him?" Park told The Daily Beast.

"Did you turn him in because you're scared that you'll be affiliated with him? You just gonna scapegoat your son out? And they just get away scot free? Like, no, you guys definitely taught him some s---. Take some f------ responsibility."

He also addressed suspicions that at least some of the victims were sex workers. Park said he confronted his mother at one point after coming across the website for her workplace, which hints that staff provide sexual services.

"She would always tell me if anyone asks, that she works at a makeup parlor," he said. "So that's what I fronted to everybody. The truth was she worked at a massage parlor and I knew that for a fact because she admitted it to me after I looked it up online. I confronted her about it, because I was worried for her. It's kind of shady. When I went there and saw it - I don't want to say it was a bad looking place, but it matched the image in my head that I was worried about."

Park said his mother told him that she had been an elementary school teacher in Korea before she immigrated to the US, and "did what she had to do" to make money. He said he's never met his father.

Park has set up a GoFundMe to raise money to support his brother and himself during this time. As of Friday morning, it had raised more than $335,000.

Park also spoke to Korean-language outlet Atlanta K, giving similar details to the Beast report.

Insider attempted to contact Park, but had not received a response as of Friday morning.

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