Man Who Lived With Suspected Atlanta Shooter at Addiction Halfway House Says He Was Ashamed of Sex Addiction

A former roommate of the man charged in the Atlanta spa shootings says the suspect was ashamed of his sexual addiction.

Tyler Bayless told Reuters he bunked with accused killer Robert Aaron Long a year and a half ago when the two of them lived at Maverick Recovery, a halfway house for recovering addicts. Bayless said he was being treated for drug addiction at the time, that Long was dealing with sex addiction, and that Long would frequent massage parlors “for explicitly sexual activity.”

Bayless told Reuters that Long was “deeply religious” and became “very emotionally distraught” when he visited massage parlors.

“In the halfway house he would describe several of his sexual addiction ‘relapses’ as he called them,” Bayless said. “He would have a deep feeling of remorse and shame and say he needed to return to prayer and to return to God.”

When Atlanta police officials held a press conference about the attack on Wednesday, they said their initial interviews with Long suggested that he was driven by a “sexual addiction,” and could not yet say that racial bias motivated him. The comments from police were met with a great deal of public skepticism given six of the victims in the spa shooting were Asian women, and comes amid a national uptick in hate crimes against Asian Americans.

Long was charged on Wednesday with eight counts of murder and one count of aggravated assault.

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