The man who survived the shooting in Atlanta with his wife says police treated him like a suspect instead of a grieving victim. He handcuffed him for hours without telling him that his husband was dead.
“They kept me at the police station all the time until they investigated who was responsible or what happened,” Mario Gonzalez said in an interview with Spanish news website Mundo Hispanico. “Finally, they told me my wife was dead.
“They knew I was her husband,” Gonzalez said. “Then they told me she was dead when I wanted to know before.
“I do not know, maybe because I’m Mexican,” he said. “Because the truth is, they treated me very badly.”
Gonzalez and his wife, 33-year-old Delaina Ashley Yaun, went to Young’s Asian Massage in their city of Acworth for a relaxing day on Tuesday and took a break to raise their two young children.
He said he was in a separate room when the gunfire broke out and he fled to safety.
His wife never made it alive.
Outside, he said, he was handcuffed by police and detained for more than two hours, while police did not tell him to the end that his wife had been killed during the massacre.
Another man, Robert Aaron Long, is in custody after admitting the crime, authorities said.
Gonzalez’s cousin Jessica Gonzalez told the Daily Mail: ‘I think it was a racial thing. [Mario] was the only one left in handcuffs.
“He kept asking, ‘Where’s my wife? Where’s my wife?'” She said. ‘And no one would answer him. He only received an answer a few hours later. ‘
Yaun was among eight people shot at three massage parlors in Atlanta, starting with the Cherokee County parlor where she and her husband went.
“What I need now is support because I have a boy and a girl,” Mario Gonzalez told Mundo Hispanico. ‘They took the most valuable thing I’ve had in my life.
“He deserves at least to die, just like all the people died,” the man said of Long.
This report originally appeared in the New York Post.