‘It’s a Hate Crime,’ Dallas Police Chief Eddie Garcia Says of Shootings at Korean Salon

At 3:38 a.m. on Tuesday, the Dallas Police Department announced on Twitter that it had arrested a suspect they believed was responsible for a shooting that injured three women of Korean descent at a hair salon a week earlier.

Shortly after 2 p.m., Dallas police Chief Eddie Garcia said at a press conference that officers had been able to track down the suspect, Jeremy Smith, by matching his vehicle, a red Honda minivan, to one seen in surveillance footage.

Smith, 37, is being held in Dallas County Jail on $300,000 bond and faces three charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, according to Dallas County arrest records.

During the investigation, Garcia said Tuesday, Smith’s girlfriend had told detectives that Smith had grown paranoid around people of Asian descent after a car crash with an Asian man two years ago. (He had been “having delusions that the Asian mob is after him or attempting to harm him,” his girlfriend also said, according to an arrest warrant.)

“As I’ve said previously, hate has no place in our city,” Garcia said at the press conference, adding that additional patrols and security cameras have been placed in the neighborhood around the salon.

“It’s a hate crime,” Garcia said. The shootings come at a time when hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have surged around the country.

Later in the conference, when asked again whether hate crimes enhancements would be applied to the charges, Garcia said, “I’m not going to get into that.”

Earlier in the day, the FBI and the Justice Department said that they had opened a federal hate crimes investigation into the shooting, The New York Times reported. “We are in close communication with Dallas police and are partnering together to thoroughly investigate this incident,” FBI in Dallas spokesperson Melinda Urbina told the Times.

Garcia also noted that police have yet to determine whether Smith was involved in two additional shootings: one in Oak Cliff on Tuesday and another in the same shopping center as the hair salon on April 2.

The three victims are in “stable condition and recovering,” Garcia added.

In 2021, hate crimes spiked by 39 percent in 37 major American cities, according to preliminary data collected by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.

In 21 of those cities, anti-Asian hate crimes had surged by some 223 percent. (In Dallas, however, the number of hate crimes tallied had dropped from 40 to 33, according to the data.)

On Friday, Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson said he wanted “our city’s Asian American community – which has appallingly faced increasing vitriol in recent years – to know that the city of Dallas and the people of Dallas stand with them.”