California prosecutors said they would seek the death penalty for a gunman accused of killing eight people in an upmarket hair salon south of Los Angeles earlier this week.
"There are some crimes that are so depraved, so callous, so malignant, that there is only one punishment that will fit the crime," Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas said in a statement on Friday.
"When a person, in a case such as this, goes on a rampage and kills innocent people in an indiscriminate bloody massacre, I will seek the death penalty."
Scott Dekraai, 41, was charged on Friday with murder and attempted murder in connection with the bloody rampage at the Salon Meritage in the resort town of Seal Beach, south of Los Angeles, at lunchtime on Wednesday.
The attack also left one person critically injured.
Prosecutors believe Dekraai\'s intended target was his ex-wife Michelle Fournier, who worked at the salon. The pair were locked in a battle for custody of their eight-year-old son. Fournier was one of the eight people killed.
Defense attorney Robert Curtis asked Superior Court Judge Erick Larsh at the arraignment hearing to order prison authorities to prescribe anti-psychotic drugs for Dekraai, who is being held without bail.
Curtis also asked that Dekraai be given a spinal cord stimulator, which the former tugboat worker needs following a 2007 boating accident which his former employer says left him permanently disabled.
The judge ordered that Dekraai be subjected to a full medical examination and said prison doctors would decide on whether to give him any medication.
Rackauckas said after the hearing that he would not be surprised if Dekraai\'s legal team mounted an insanity defense.
Dekraai was arrested shortly after the shooting spree -- the deadliest ever in Seal Beach, a small town of 25,000 people where homicides are rare.
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