All the names of the Atlanta-shooting victims, first reported by A Journey through NYC religions. Short bios.
The names of five of the victims in the Atlanta-area shootings have been released by the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Department
33-year-old Delaina Ashley Yaun, of Acworth.
54-year-old Paul Andre Michels, of Atlanta
49-year-old Xiaojie Tan, of Kennesaw
44-year-old Daoyou Feng
Elcias R. Hernandez-Ortiz, 30, of Acworth, injured outside of the Young’s Asian Massage.
The Fulton County Medical Examiner has released the names of the remaining Korean victims:
51-year-old Hyun Jung Grant
63-year-old Yong Ae Yue
69-year-old Sun Cha Kim
74-year-old Soon Chung Park
Short bios of the victims, as we confirm them:
Daoyou Feng had just started working at the spa in the past few months, according to a friend. However, no address is known for Feng. Her surname is Chinese, but information about her has yet to be confirmed by officials.
Hyun Jung Grant was an employee at Gold Spa in Atlanta. She spent most of her time working, rising early and returning late at night, according to her son, Eric Park. A single mother, she worried about helping her two sons. She was playful and fun and had a young spirit — she liked to say she had the mind of a young teenager, Mr. Park said. She enjoyed watching Korean dramas and whipped up bowls of kimchi jjigae. “As long as we were together, she was pretty happy,” he said.
The trio was close-knit, as the rest of their family lived in Korea and the brothers did not have a relationship with their father
Sun Cha Kim was an employee at Gold Spa. A grandmother who enjoyed line dancing in her spare time, she had been married for more than 50 years, a family member said. She had immigrated to the United States from Korea “to provide us a better education and better life,” said the family member
Paul Andre Michels was a local business owner who had been married for over two decades. Family members described him as a hardworking Army veteran who owned an electric company. John Michels, his 52-year-old brother, who lives in Michigan, told The Daily Beast on Wednesday that his brother, a White American, was interested in “getting in the massage business” and was looking to own establishments. His brother also observed that Paul was a Catholic as well as a strong political conservative. It’s unclear why he was at the spa.
Elcias Hernandez Ortiz, who goes by Alex, is the lone survivor of the Cherokee County shooting. According to a fundraiser by his wife, he is in intensive care, after being shot in his forehead, with the bullet traveling into his lungs and stomach. He got shot while he was going into a money-exchange store. From Guatemala more than ten years ago, he worked as an auto mechanic and earned the reputation and money to start an auto repair shop. Some compatriots say that they think that Hernandez-Ortiz identified as Guatemalan American and White. He was married to Flora Gonzalez Gomez and has a 10-year-old daughter, whose birthday is this week. He is hanging onto life.
Soon Chung Park’s son-in-law, Scott Lee, said in an interview with the New York Times that the 74-year-old worked at Gold Spa and “got along with her family so well.” Lee added that she had previously lived in New York, where many of her relatives still live before moving to Atlanta.
She moved to the United States from South Korea in the 1970s, coming with her husband, Mac Peterson, whom she had met while he was stationed in the Army. They had one son before moving to Fort Benning, Ga., and having another son, Mr. Peterson said. She found work as a cashier at a grocery store outside of Fort Benning and the couple stayed there until getting divorced in 1982.
Xiaojie Tan apparently owned Young’s Asian Massage and appeared to be a hardworking Chinese American business owner, promoting her establishments on social media. Tan is a licensed massage therapist, local legal requirement, and owned at least one other spa in Atlanta. The New York Times quotes one customer, a weightlifter who visited the spa for massage relief of pain, as saying that Tan was “just the sweetest, kindest, most giving person.” Her funeral will be in a Catholic church.
The South China Morning Post writes that “Tan was the youngest of two girls, born to a bicycle mechanic dad and mum who were Catholics in the Communist country. She met Michael Webb, an American businessman travelling for work, in her birth city of Nanning in China, which sits on the border with Vietnam. The couple married in 2004. Webb brought his new family to Port St Lucie, Florida, in 2006 and legally adopted Jami, whose Americanized name is a combination of her mum and Michael’s names.
The family moved to Georgia in 2010. A couple of months later, Tan’s dream of becoming a business owner came true opening up a nail salon in downtown Marietta square outside Atlanta. Tan bought two single-family homes on her own and a commercial property. The couple split up in 2012 but remained close raising their daughter. They cried together at their daughter’s graduation from the University of Georgia in 2019. Michael Webb, who works as a contractor, helped to remodel Tan’s second business, Young’s Asian Massage, last year during Covid-19 business shutdowns.”
Friends say that Delaina Ashley Yaun was an incredible mom, who loved her kids and her husband. The White American had just married Mario González in August. Their daughter is 9 months old. They were out on a date at the spa. Yaun’s husband could hear the gunfire inside the spa but was helpless to save his wife, Dana Toole, Yaun’s sister, told WAGA-TV.
John Beck, 27, was Ms. Yaun’s manager at a nearby Waffle House and described her as “the most hard-working, most determined, most outspokenly good-hearted person I’ve ever met.” She had been a server and grill operator at the Waffle House, Mr. Beck said, arriving in the morning blasting gospel music and often buying eggs and grits for homeless people who had no money for food.
Yong Ae Yue was a licensed massage therapist, who laid off last year when the pandemic hit and was excited to finally start shifts at a spa again, her son Robert Peterson told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. After marrying an American soldier, she came to Georgia in the 1980snd fed her family with Korean home cooking she brought to Georgia in the 1980s Elliott Peterson, 42, the couple’s oldest, also served in the U.S. Army before retiring in September.
Sources are press availabilities, interviews, NY Times interview summaries, Korean Press, and other places.
