Atlanta area spa shooting suspect indicted, faces potential death penalty

The suspect in the March fatal shootings at several massage parlors in the Atlanta area in the U.S. state of Georgia was indicted on murder charges on Tuesday, with a prosecutor filing to seek death penalty for him.

Robert Arron Long, 21, was indicted by a Fulton County grand jury for the fatal shootings of four victims on March 16 at two spas in Atlanta. The indictment charges Long with four counts of murder, four counts of felony murder, five counts of assault with a deadly weapon, four counts of possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony and one count of domestic terrorism.

The indictment doesn't cover the slaying, also committed by Long, of four others at another massage parlor in Cherokee County in the Atlanta suburb. Charges related to this incident, in which another person was injured, will be decided by a Cherokee County grand jury.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis also filed a notice that she intends to seek hate crime charges and the death penalty against Long, who is white. The hate crime charges are based on actual or perceived race, national origin, sex and gender, according to the notice.

While Long claimed in an initial interview with investigators that his actions were not racially motivated, that he had a "sex addiction," and that authorities said he views the parlors as "a temptation that he wanted to eliminate," the shootings, which happened against the backdrop of a spike in anti-Asian hate incidents across the country, spurred outrage given the locations and the fact that six of the eight victims were women of Asian descent.

In its reasoning for the death penalty, the notice said each of the killings was committed while Long was in the act of committing another capital offense, namely the killings of the victims. Each killing was also "outrageously or wantonly vile, horrible, or inhuman in that it involved depravity of mind" and was committed during an act of domestic terrorism, it said.

According to Georgia law, a hate crime cannot be charged on its own. Only after a person is convicted of an underlying crime can a jury decide the merits of such a charge, which carries an additional penalty.