“All I can think about is her,” Mr. Park said. “Looking at the news just gets me mad. That deputy saying the shooter had a bad day — how is that a bad day? To me it’s a hate crime no matter how it looked.”
‘Just the sweetest, kindest, most giving person’
Xiaojie Tan, the hardworking owner of Young’s Asian Massage in Acworth, Ga., where four people were killed, made her patrons feel at home and treated her friends like family, one longtime customer said on Thursday. Ms. Tan died two days ahead of her 50th birthday.
One of her employees, Daoyou Feng, was also among those left dead on Tuesday.
Greg Hynson, the longtime customer of Ms. Tan, described her as “just the sweetest, kindest, most giving person.” He last saw her last weekend, he said, when stopping by her spa to say hello.
Ms. Tan, whose friends called her Emily, was originally from China and had a daughter she was tremendously proud of, he said. Mr. Hynson, a former competitive weight lifter, had regular appointments for massages to ease his upper neck trauma, and he and Ms. Tan had been friends for years.
“It just doesn’t seem real that she’s not around,” he said. When he heard about the shooting, he rushed to the scene and was horrified to see police lights flashing from a block away. “I was in a state of shock,” he said.
Ms. Feng, 44, had just started working at the spa in the past few months, Mr. Hynson said.
“They welcomed you,” he said. “If you were a friend of Emily’s, you were a friend of theirs.”