A police captain who appeared to excuse an Atlanta-area mass shooting suspect as having been triggered by a ''bad day'' was defended Thursday by a top local law enforcement official.
At a Wednesday news conference, Cherokee County Sheriff's Capt. Jay Baker made the controversial comment about Robert Long, 21, who was collared hours after Tuesday’s killing of eight people at massage parlors — six of them Asian women.
"I spoke with investigators, they interviewed him this morning. And they got that impression, yes — he understood the gravity of it,'' Baker told reporters, ABC News reported.
''And he was pretty much fed up and had been, kind of, at the end of his rope. And yesterday was a really bad day for him, and this is what he did.''
The explanation caused an uproar, but in a statement Thursday, Cherokee County Sheriff Frank Reynolds defended Baker.
According to Reynolds, the comments were "taken or construed as insensitive or inappropriate" but that they ''were not intended to disrespect any of the victims, the gravity of this tragedy, or express empathy or sympathy for the suspect,'' ABC News reported.
''Captain Baker had a difficult task before him, and this was one of the hardest in his twenty-eight years in law enforcement," Reynolds said.
"I have known and served with Captain Baker for many years. His personal ties to the Asian community and his unwavering support and commitment to the citizens of Cherokee County are well known to many," he continued. "On behalf of the dedicated women and men of the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office we regret any heartache Captain Baker’s words may have caused."
ABC News reported Baker is also under fire for a post on a now-deleted Facebook account that appeared to belong to him.
A post from March 30, 2020, said, "Place your order while they last," with a smiley emoji next to an image of T-shirts for sale that read, "Covid-19 Imported from Chy-na."
ABC News reported the Facebook account holder who shared the T-shirt image claimed that his employer was the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office. His account included a photo of Baker in uniform outside the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office. The account was deleted Wednesday night.
The eight victims, the majority of whom were women of Asian descent, were gunned down at spas in the Atlanta area amid a rise in anti-Asian hate crimes across the nation.
Long claimed to police that he has a sex addiction, and authorities said he apparently lashed out at what he saw as sources of temptation.
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