A 69-year-old man fatally shot two people and wounded three others in back-to-back attacks at a North Texas shopping center and a nearby apartment complex on May 5, 2026, authorities said, in a targeted outburst of violence police say was driven by a soured business relationship.
The first shooting erupted just before 10 a.m. at K Towne Plaza, a retail hub in the Koreatown neighborhood of Carrollton, a city of more than 130,000 residents about 20 miles north of Dallas. Officers arriving at the scene found three adults with gunshot wounds and one person dead. As detectives began processing the scene, a second call came in: another shooting at an apartment complex roughly four miles away, where police discovered a dead man inside one of the units.
The suspect, identified by police as Seung Ho Han, was arrested a short time later at H Mart on Old Denton Road in Carrollton after a brief foot chase. Investigators believe Han carried out both shootings.
A Targeted Attack, Not Random Violence
Carrollton Police Chief Roberto Arredondo said the violence was not random and that the victims were known to the gunman. Han told detectives he was angry over financial disputes tied to past business dealings.
“It was a known business relationship. We’re still trying to work to identify what caused his actions,” Arredondo said.
Authorities have identified the two people killed as Sung Rae Cho, 63, of Denton County, and Edward Schleigh. The three injured — Olivia Kim, Yo Sung Kim, and Young Yoo — are expected to survive and were in stable condition.
Court documents reveal the dispute centered on a $75,000 business deal involving Han’s sushi restaurant and a Georgia property investment that he says went bad. The wounded survivors told detectives they had gathered at the strip mall with Cho for a meeting when Han arrived and opened fire.
Officers later converged on a nearby apartment complex where Han had lived recently. Neighbors who spoke with investigators said they did not recognize his name.
Heavy Federal Presence at the Scene
Video circulating online showed Carrollton officers moving cautiously past storefronts at K Towne Plaza with their weapons drawn in the chaotic minutes after the first shooting. Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and at least one other federal agency were among the law enforcement personnel who responded, with FBI agents seen collecting evidence in the parking lot throughout the afternoon.
The federal involvement underscored the scale of the response, even as police described the case as a personal dispute rather than an act of mass terror. Detectives spent hours canvassing the shopping plaza, interviewing witnesses, and reviewing surveillance footage to piece together the sequence of events between the two shooting locations.
Shock Ripples Through Koreatown
The shootings landed hard in Carrollton’s tight-knit Korean American community, where K Towne Plaza is a familiar gathering place. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, more than 4,000 of the city’s residents are of Korean descent — a population that has helped transform this Dallas suburb into the largest Korean community in the southern United States.
“We’re shocked,” said John Jun, who is active in the Korean American community. “We’re not immune to something like this happening, but we are very generally a peaceful community that works hard.”
Over the past 20 years, the neighborhood has flourished thanks to investment from Korean entrepreneurs. It is anchored by H Mart, the well-known Asian supermarket chain, and lined with dozens of restaurants offering everything from Korean fried chicken to shaved ice desserts known as bingsu. The city is also home to multiple Korean churches, including Baptist and Presbyterian congregations that draw worshippers from across the metro area.
For longtime residents and small business owners, the daytime gunfire was a jarring intrusion on a community that prides itself on stability and entrepreneurship. Several merchants in the plaza closed their doors for the remainder of the day as the investigation unfolded.
Investigation Continues Into Business Dispute
Police are still working to determine the exact nature of the meeting that preceded the shootings and the specifics of the financial disputes Han allegedly cited. Arredondo emphasized that while investigators have established that the encounters at the plaza and the apartment complex were connected, many questions remain about why tensions escalated so violently on the morning of May 5.
The case adds Carrollton to a string of recent shopping center shootings across the country, though officials in Carrollton stressed that this incident appears to have been driven by a personal grievance rather than indiscriminate violence directed at the public.
Han remained in custody on the evening of May 5 as detectives continued their interviews and prepared to formally present charges. Court documents also revealed that after the shootings, Han drove to H Mart to say goodbye to friends at the fish market, telling police he had planned to take his own life before officers took him into custody.
For now, residents of Carrollton’s Koreatown were left to grapple with an unsettling reality — that a violent dispute, born from the world of business, had spilled out into the streets of a community known for its quiet diligence and growing prosperity.