ATLANTA (Reuters) - A man pleaded guilty on Tuesday to the shooting deaths of four people killed in attacks on Atlanta-area spas in March that ended the life of eight people, six of them women of Asian descent.
Dressed in a white, button-down shirt with an open collar, and dress slacks and sporting a mohawk haircut, Robert Aaron Long, 22, pleaded guilty in court to the four murders at the day spa in Cherokee County, about 40 miles (64 km) north of Atlanta.
Long, holding his head up but looking somber, also affirmed agreement with the state's recommendation of four life sentences without possibility of parole, to be served consecutively, plus 35 years on other charges.
Long has also been charged in the March 16 killings of four women at spas in Atlanta, where the district attorney has said she believed the women were targeted because of their race, national origin and gender and would seek the death penalty.
The killings, which Cherokee officials have tied to "sex addiction," galvanized awareness of a wave of anti-Asian bias and violence in the United States in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, which is believed to have originated in China.
But Cherokee District Attorney Shannon Wallace said her office's investigation did not turn up any bias based on race or gender.
"We were not able to conclude that it was motivated by bias or race," she told the court. "In discussing this case, this was not any kind of hate crime."
Long initially went to Youngs Asian Massage with the intent to engage in sexual activity to obtain the "necessary amount of shame and hate" to kill himself over his struggle with sex addiction, Wallace said.
At some point, while drinking bourbon, Long decided instead to carry out "vigilante justice" to end the sex industry, she said.
The victims in Cherokee County have been identified as: Delaina Ashley Yaun, 33; Paul Andre Michels, 54; Xiaojie Yan, 49; and Daoyou Feng, 44.
(Reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta and Nathan Layne in Wilton, Connecticut;Editing by Alistair Bell)