One man was detained on Wednesday 29th June 2022 at the Sri Chaitanya Saraswat Mission near Liberty Park in Salt Lake City USA after he broke into a live-streaming of a devotional program and and abused and threatened the people there. Before being apprehended outside the Hindu temple and yoga studio, the man is believed to have also fired shots at a home in Salt Lake County, a convenience store, and a grocery store somewhere else in the city. According to a report by The Salt Lake Tribune, the man allegedly fired rounds into the air and out of his car window, citing police spokesman Melody Cutler.
According to Cutler, the individual who was detained knew the Salt Lake County homeowner who also owned the yoga studio. She said that the suspect was a former member of the yoga studio. Cutler told that the arrested person was warned not to return after he behaved aggressively with some of the other attendees at the yog a class.
Around 9 a.m., a throng of policemen came to the studio after witnesses phoned the police, and studio staff informed the owner that a suspect had arrived. Around 9:30 a.m., police seized the suspect inside his car outside the studio and put him in jail. Melody Cutler said, “No one was hit by gunfire, but the man got into a physical altercation with the yoga studio employees, and one suffered minor injuries.”
The international Bhakti Yoga Society’s Salt Lake City chapter is housed at the studio. The man allegedly entered the room around 13 minutes into a woman’s broadcast from the studio to the group’s Facebook page. While the man had covered the camera, it was still running, and the audio was live-streamed for over an hour. The man had left the building and police had arrived when finally the streaming was cut. The footage was later taken off the web page. As of Wednesday night, no official charges had been brought against the apprehended individual. The police are still investigating.
It is notable that, before Salt Lake City, such incidents of random firing in the USA have frequently happened in the recent past. In the month of June 2022, such incidents claiming multiple lives took place in Oklahoma, Philadelphia, and Washington.
