Half Moon Bay Immigrant Community Reels From Mass Shooting of Farmworkers

Sheriff Robert Luna of Los Angeles County disclosed additional findings in a Wednesday night news conference. He said that investigators had determined that Mr. Tran had not visited the Star Ballroom Dance Studio in the last five years and that a motorcycle registered to the suspect had been about a block away from the site of the shooting. The authorities believe that it had been placed there as a potential getaway vehicle, Sheriff Luna said.

In Northern California, the workers and their families from the two Half Moon Bay farms, who had already suffered from the fierce rainstorms that flooded fields and washed away roads, remained in hotels on Wednesday, and it was unclear when they would be able to return to their trailers — and even if they would want to after what they have been through.

“I don’t think they will feel safe returning to the farm,” said Judith Guerrero, executive director of the Coastside Hope, a nonprofit that assists the immigrant community. “They are trying to make sense of it all.”

Tucked off Highways 92 and 1, farms in the Half Moon Bay region grow a bounty of vegetables, from mushrooms to brussels sprouts to artichokes, as well as flowers. And many farmworkers, in a region where the price of a typical home is well over a million dollars, make around $15 an hour and live in trailers or packed into tight homes where the rent can swallow much of their earnings.

David Oates, a crisis-management consultant hired by the owner of California Terra Garden after the massacre, said that Mr. Zhao had been renting a trailer on the farm property where he worked for years. The company employs 35 people at the site once known as Mountain Mushroom Farm. Four of them were killed, and one remains in the hospital, Mr. Oates said.

Belinda Hernandez-Arriaga, the director of the Ayudando Latinos A Soñar, a nonprofit that works with migrant farmworkers, said that as far as she knew there were no tensions between the small group of farmworkers of Asian descent, and those who are Latino. “They live in the same community,” she said. “There’s a lot of respect there.”

Aaron Tung, whose family has owned Concord Farms since 1987, said that everyone called Mr. Jimenez, “Ma Ding,” — the Chinese words for “horse” and “nail,” a loose rendering of his last name.