(Reuters) – Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles brought hate crime charges on Friday against a man accused of shooting two people this week in a predominantly Jewish section of Los Angeles.
The FBI said in charging documents in the case that Jaime Tran, 29, told police after his arrest that he had looked up the location of businesses selling kosher food as a way to find a Jewish neighborhood.
The agency said that Tran, 29, had a long history of making anti-Semitic remarks and sending graphic, anti-Jewish emails to fellow students at a dental school he once attended.
Tran confessed to shooting at two men who appeared to be Jewish based on their clothing, the FBI said in charging documents seen by Reuters. One man was shot in the back on Wednesday, and the other shot in the arm on Thursday in brazen daylight attacks in Los Angeles’ Pico Robertson neighborhood.
The men, who are Jewish, survived.
Tran was arrested on Thursday in Cathedral City, a desert community about 100 miles east of Los Angeles, after a witness reported he had fired an assault weapon there.
“This week, the Pico Robertson community where I grew up was terrorized,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said at a news conference on Friday. “Our Jewish community was terrorized and that terror was shared all across Los Angeles.”
The Los Angeles Police Department said it had increased patrols through Jewish neighborhoods and will continue to keep a heightened presence in coming days.
Pico Robertson is a neighborhood in West Los Angeles that has a large Jewish population and is dotted with delis, small synagogues and several private Jewish schools. The Los Angeles area has the second largest Jewish community in the United States, after the New York area.
(Reporting by Brendan O’Brien in Chicago and Sharon Bernstein in Sacramento; Editing by David Gregorio)
