- The Atlanta-area shooting suspect was kicked out of his home for
sex addiction , a source told CNN. - Law enforcement said before that Robert Aaron Long cited the addiction after being arrested.
- A racial motive has not been ruled out, as six of the victims were Asian women.
Robert Aaron Long, the suspect accused of killing eight people in a shooting spree in three Atlanta-area spas, was kicked out of his family home for sex addiction, a source has told CNN.
Law enforcement officials said at a Wednesday press conference that Long told them he has a sex addiction. They said he described the spas where the shootings took place as a source of "temptation."
An unnamed law enforcement source told CNN that this addiction recently prompted his family to evict him from the home where he spent hours watching pornography online.
A former roommate of Long's, 35-year-old Tyler Bayless, told Reuters that he felt ashamed of the addiction and would use massage parlors to seek sex.
Bayless said he had lived with Long in an Atlanta halfway house for recovering addicts between late 2019 and early 2020. Long received treatment for sex addiction there, Bayless said. He described Long as "deeply religious."
"In the halfway house he would describe several of his sexual addiction 'relapses' as he called them," Bayless told Reuters. "He would have a deep feeling of remorse and shame and say he needed to return to prayer and to return to God."
Long was charged on Wednesday with eight counts of murder and one of aggravated assault. Six of the victims killed in the shooting were Asian women.
Prosecutors said that Long told them race played no part in the attack, with Cherokee County Sheriff Frank Reynolds saying Wednesday that the killings "might not be" racially motivated.
But amid roiling public debate, prosecutors are considering whether or not to charge him with a hate
There has been widespread public pushback at the idea that race was not a factor, as Insider's Ashley Collman reported.
David Palumbo-Liu, a Stanford comparative literature professor, told The Washington Post that the two potential motivations could be intertwined.
"The shooter said it wasn't racially motivated, but on the other hand, he's going specifically to these spas where Asian women work precisely to serve the sexual fantasies of white males, so to disentangle them is really to do a disservice to the fact that these things are so linked together," Palumbo-Liu said.