The husband who survived the Atlanta spa shootings that killed his wife says cops treated him like a suspect instead of a grieving victim — keeping him handcuffed for hours without telling him his spouse was dead.
“They had me at the police station for all that time until they investigated who was responsible or what had happened,” Mario Gonzalez said during an interview with the Spanish-language news site Mundo Hispanico. “In the end, they told me my wife had died.
“They knew I was her husband,” Gonzalez said. “Then they told me she was dead when I wanted to know before.
“I don’t know, maybe because I’m Mexican,” he said. “Because the truth is that they treated me very badly.”
Gonzalez and his wife, 33-year-old Delaina Ashley Yaun, had gone to Young’s Asian Massage in their town of Acworth on Tuesday for a relaxing day and to take a break from raising 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 out alive.
Outside, he said, he was handcuffed by police and held for more than two hours — with the cops not telling him until the end that his wife had been killed in the slaughter.
Another man, Robert Aaron Long, is in custody after confessing to the crime, authorities have said.
Gonzalez’s niece, 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 nobody would give him an answer. He didn’t get an answer until a couple hours later.”
Yaun was among eight people gunned down at three Atlanta-area massage parlors, starting with the Cherokee County salon 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 have in my life.
“At minimum he deserves to die, just like all of those people died,” the man said of Long.
