A tragedy to be sure but when white people are killed by people of color, somehow the words 'hate crime' never make it to print.

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Eight people were shot to death at three massage parlors in the Atlanta area on Tuesday evening, the authorities said, raising fears that the crimes may have targeted people of Asian descent.

Six of the people killed were Asian, and two were white, according to law enforcement officials. All but one were women.

A suspect, identified as Robert Aaron Long, 21, of Woodstock, Ga., was captured in Crisp County in South Georgia after a manhunt, said the authorities, who had earlier released a surveillance image of a suspect near a Hyundai Tucson outside one of the massage parlors.

The suspect in custody is white, and it was not clear whether there was a racial motivation in the shootings. Even so, Stop AAPI Hate, formed to prevent anti-Asian discrimination during the coronavirus pandemic, called the shootings “an unspeakable tragedy” for both the victims’ families and an Asian-American community that has “been reeling from high levels of racist attacks.”

Four people died in the first shooting, at Young’s Asian Massage near Acworth, a northwest suburb of Atlanta, said Capt. Jay Baker of the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office. That shooting, in which a Hispanic man was injured, was reported around 5 p.m.

At 5:47 p.m., the Atlanta police said, officers responded to a robbery at Gold Spa in the northeast part of the city, where they found the bodies of three women with gunshot wounds. While the officers were at the scene, the police said, they received a report of shots fired at the Aromatherapy Spa across the street, where they found the body of another woman.