ATLANTA – From early in the morning until late at night, Hyun Jung Grant was at work. She was a single mother with life's unyielding obligations: two sons who needed college tuition, the rent on the home they all shared, the relentless drumbeat of bills.
An immigrant from South Korea, Grant, 51, did not talk much about her job at Gold Spa, a massage parlor in a neon-lit stretch of strip malls in northeastern Atlanta. She preferred to tell people that she worked at a makeup store.
"She didn't want us to worry about her ever," said her son Eric Park, 20.
Grant was among eight people shot to death Tuesday evening. Another victim is still hospitalized.
They had come a long way to the storefronts of metro Atlanta. They had come from Korea, from China, from Guatemala, from Detroit, from right up the road in Acworth, Ga. Most had come to work, perhaps to put some aside for children and even grandchildren, to carve out a little bit of security and independence for themselves and their families.
Then a young man with a gun arrived, and over the course of a single violent hour, years of work and accumulated opportunities were put to an abrupt end.
"All I can think about is her," said Park, recalling the days at the mall and aquarium, just him and his brother and his mother, the bowls of soondubu at Korean restaurants, the kimchi jjigae she made herself. "It's just us two now."
Twenty-five miles up the interstate from Gold Spa, amid the strip malls and parking lots of the Atlanta suburbs, sits Young's Asian Massage, a shop that was kept running through long days and late evenings by Xiaojie Tan.
"She worked from 9 to 9 almost every day," said Ashley Zhang, a friend of Tan's, who like her was a Chinese immigrant. "We're here for opportunity," she said. "We work so hard. We want the American dream to come true."
Tan, a mother and businesswoman who was known to her friends as Emily, owned the spa and had made it into a place where patrons felt at home, said Greg Hynson, a longtime customer who had seen her last weekend. She was "just the sweetest, kindest, most giving person," he said, and she set a tone that the other employees followed.
"They welcomed you," Hynson said. "If you were a friend of Emily's, you were a friend of theirs."
One of those workers was Daoyou Feng, 44, who according to Hynson had started working at the spa a few months ago. She was among those killed Tuesday.
When the gunman showed up, Delaina Ashley Yaun, 33, was there with her husband, having arrived shortly beforehand. Unlike the others who were killed, Yaun had been born and raised in the area.
She knew about hard work.
"I've worked with a lot of people in my life," said John Beck, 27, who had been Yaun's manager at a nearby Waffle House. "Delaina was the most hardworking, most determined, most outspokenly good-hearted person I've ever met."
She had been a server and master grill operator at the Waffle House, Beck said, arriving in the morning blasting gospel music and often buying eggs and grits for homeless people who had no money for food. She was raising a son by herself, but she also kept a motherly eye on Beck, checking in regularly to make sure he was OK.
Her big dream, Beck said, was to get married. And last year, she did just that, marrying Mario Gonzalez, whom Beck said she had met at the Waffle House when he showed up as a customer. They soon had a daughter. It was "real love," Beck said.
Tuesday was a date — they were going to get massages together.
Paul Andre Michels, 54, an electrician, was also killed at the spa Tuesday. He was a "workaholic," said his brother Fred Michels. He grew up as the seventh of nine children in a working-class Catholic family in Detroit that had a long history of building and fixing things. His father painted Cadillacs at a General Motors plant, his mother kept the family fed with pierogies and stuffed cabbage, and he went off to join the Army.
Michels returned to Detroit but eventually settled in Atlanta, his brother said, marrying and starting his own electrical business.
As the employees met with patrons inside the business, Elcias Hernandez-Ortiz, 30, was out front, walking to a money exchange business next door. He had come to the area from Guatemala about 10 years ago, "like most immigrants living here," his wife, Flor Gonzalez, said, leaving home "to look for a better life."
He found work as a mechanic, sending some money to his family in Guatemala and taking care of his family here — the couple had been planning for next week's birthday of their daughter Yoseline.
Ortiz-Hernandez, who was shot but survived the attack, remains hospitalized in critical condition.
Back in northeastern Atlanta, on the border of one of the most upscale parts of town, sits a small pocket of tattoo shops, strip clubs and massage parlors. Among these are Gold Spa, where Grant worked alongside Suncha Kim, 69, and Soon Chung Park, who, at 74, was the oldest person to be killed Tuesday.
Kim, a grandmother who enjoyed line dancing in her spare time, had been married for more than 50 years, a family member said. She had immigrated to the United States from Korea "to provide us a better education and better life," said the family member, who asked not to be named for privacy reasons. "Just a regular American family and worked really hard."
Park had lived in New York before moving to Atlanta, a son-in-law, Scott Lee, said in a brief interview on Friday. She had stayed close with her relatives, many of whom still live in New York and New Jersey. "She got along with her family so well," Lee said in Korean.
Across the street from Gold Spa is Aromatherapy Spa, where Yong Ae Yue worked.
Yue, 63, moved to the United States from South Korea in the 1970s, coming with her husband, Mac Peterson, whom she had met while he was stationed in the Army. They had one son before moving to Fort Benning, Ga., and having another son, Peterson said.
Yue found work as a cashier at a grocery store outside Fort Benning and the couple stayed there until getting divorced in 1982. Their families had been close and they had kept in touch.
"She was a good mother," Peterson said. "She was always there for her kids."
Yue was the last person killed in the shootings Tuesday.
