How the ATF's gun tracing system helped police find the gunman in the Monterey Park mass shooting
While sometimes slow, the tracing system from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives played an instrumental role in helping law enforcement locate the man who opened fire inside a Monterey Park dance hall in 2022.
The gunman killed 11 people, making it the deadliest mass shooting in Los Angeles County history.
In the scared and uncertain moments after innocent dancing descended into gunfire and police found a suspect dead in a van 12 hours later, Detective Corey Fukumoto arrived at the Lai Lai Dance Hall after 26-year-old Brandon Tsay wrestled the suspect's firearm away from him.
"Our patrol had already run the firearm and didn't come back with a match in-house," Fukumoto said. "I contacted Special Agent Catanzano and asked him if he could help out with a trace."
Agent Ryan Catanzano said it was about 1 a.m. when he woke up to Fukumoto's call. Surprised because the two had only spoken days before by chance, Catanzano relayed the firearm's serial number to the ATF's tracing center.
"From there, I believe it was a couple of hours," Catanzano recalled. "We got the trace result back."
The trace helped Fukumoto and his fellow investigators identify the suspect and matched it to a vehicle in his name. The name was Huu Can Tran and his identity not only helped police find him quickly but helped deliver a surprisingly quick result from the ATF's trace center.
"The way the National Tracing Center works, that info is not searchable in a way we would be able to get instant results," Catanzano said.
At the West Virginia center, a CBS investigation detailed an astounding bureaucratic backlog. In antiquated halls, there are hundreds of millions of paper records that many times need to be sorted through to trace a gun. The stacks of physical records happened because the agency was handcuffed by a 1986 law preventing it from using an electronic database to easily search ownership records.
It results in delays 99% of the time, spanning from several days to weeks and sometimes even months to find critical criminal details.
"It's incredibly important," Catanzano said. "Every trace that we get tells a story of what took place. How that firearm was recovered."
California is one of 12 states that mandates all police agencies to use the trace center. Our investigation shows the state uses the service more than anywhere else in the country with 42,000 traces in 2019 growing 26% to more 56,000 in 2022.
LA traces have surged by 35% over the same time. There have been thousands of traces also across Southern California in places like San Bernardino, Riverside, Victorville and Ontario.
"The more traces that we get in there, the more stories we can identify, the more cases we can build and really identify traffickers and crime guns.," Catanzano said.
However, this requires the system to undergo an overhaul into the modern era. Until then, critical information will remain locked up for days.
"It could be the difference between filing a case and not," Fukumoto said.
The ATF tries to return a trace in about 1 or two days but typically takes longer than that. There have been many attempts to fix the system since the 1980s, one of which is the Aim Act. It would allow the agency to create a searchable database but any momentum the bill had has led nowhere.
The federal agency is asking Congress for tens of millions dollars for upgrades.