Virginia, Nov. 23 (BNA): A Walmart supervisor armed with a handgun and several magazines of ammunition opened fire on fellow employees at a Virginia store, killing six people before turning the gun on himself in the break room, witnesses and police said. Wednesday.
The Virginia gunman, Andre Bing, 31, of Chesapeake, said nothing as he began shooting at workers gathered before their night shift, according to two employees who were in the break room, as the rampage ended and Bing shot himself.
“I just witnessed 3 of my co-workers/friends get killed in front of me,” Dounia Priollo wrote in a Facebook post. “Andre killed them in cold blood… I can’t ignore what happened in that break room.”
Police said at least three people were wounded in the attack, which took place while about 50 people were in the store, a megastore located near Wal-Mart Square near Battlefield Boulevard in the Chesapeake, a city of about 250,000 people, according to Reuters.
Among the dead was a 16-year-old boy who was not identified by police, and 70-year-old Randy Blevins, who was planning to retire in a year, a cousin wrote on Facebook.
The rest are Kelly Pyle, 52, Lorenzo Gamble, 43, and Randy Blevins, 70, all from the Chesapeake, and Tenika Johnson, 22, from nearby Portsmouth.
Authorities say they are investigating what may have been the motive for Peng, an hourly employee who oversaw the night shift and has worked for the company since 2010. The city said its SWAT team executed a search warrant at his home.
“I looked up and my manager just opened the door, and he just opened fire,” another Walmart employee named Brianna Tyler told ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
Several co-workers at Bing told CNN that he has displayed strange and sometimes threatening behavior in the past. He also made paranoid comments, expressing fears that the government was watching him, according to CNN interviews.
Jesse Wilczewski told WAVY-TV that she hid under a table and the shooter pointed at her and told her to go home.
“It didn’t feel real until you felt the captivity,” said the store clerk. “You can feel it.” “I couldn’t hear it at first because I think it was so loud. I could feel it.”
In the aftermath of a mass shooting at a Walmart in the Chesapeake
The latest massacre has sparked a renewed round of condemnations from public officials and activists and calls for tighter gun control.
President Joe Biden called the shooting “another horrific, senseless act of violence,” referring to a shooting this month that killed three University of Virginia students.
“There are now more tables across the country that will have empty seats on Thanksgiving,” Biden said in a statement.
Mass shootings in the United States average twice a day, when defined as an incident in which four or more people are killed or injured, according to GunViolenceArchive.org.
Jessica Burgess, a surgeon who treated the victims at Norfolk Hospital, said she had called a colleague in Colorado Springs just two days earlier to offer support.
“So it’s very frustrating now that I’m in the same situation with my teammates from all over the country checking on me and my team,” Burgess said. “Sometimes there’s only so much we can do when the injuries have already occurred.”
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, already facing mounting calls for policies to address gun violence after the University of Virginia killings, ordered flags on local, state and federal buildings to be flown at half-staff.
Wal-Mart, which has thousands of stores across the country, has experienced violence before.
In August 2019, 23 people were killed at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, near the US-Mexico border in an act law enforcement called domestic terrorism. It was also the deadliest attack on the Hispanic community in the United States in modern times.
Walmart imposed new restrictions on gun and ammunition sales after the shootings in 2019, as it did after other shootings in its stores.
“The devastating news of last night’s shooting in a Chesapeake, VA store at the hands of one of our partners has deeply affected the Walmart family,” Walmart CEO Doug McMillon wrote in a LinkedIn post.
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