Walmart manager kills 6 in Virginia in another mass murder

CHESAPEAKE, Va. (AP) — A Walmart manager pulled out a gun before a regular employee meeting and opened fire around a store break room in Virginia, killing six people in the second country’s first mass shooting in four days, according to police. and the witnesses said.

The gunman was dead when officers arrived at the store in Chesapeake, Virginia’s second-largest city, on Tuesday night. Authorities said it appears he shot himself. Police were trying to determine a motive. One employee described seeing “bodies falling” as the gunman fired randomly without saying a word.

“He just walked across the room. It didn’t matter who he hit. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t look at anybody a certain way,” Walmart employee Briana Tyler said Wednesday.

Six people were injured in the shooting, which happened shortly after 10 p.m., as shoppers were stocking up before the Thanksgiving holiday. Police said they believed about 50 people were in the store at the time.

The gunman was identified as Andre Bing, 31, an overnight crew chief who had been employed at Walmart since 2010. Police said he had a handgun and several rounds of ammunition.

Tyler said the overnight stocking crew of 15-20 people just gathered in the break room to review the morning schedule. He said the meeting was about to start and a foreman said, “Okay boys, we’ve got a quiet evening ahead of us.” Then Bing turned and opened fire on the stick.

At first, Tyler doubted the shooting was real, believing it to be active shooter practice.

“It all happened so fast,” he said, adding: “By the grace of God, a bullet missed me. I saw the smoke coming out of the gun and literally saw the bodies fall. It was crazy.”

Police said three of the dead, including Bing, were found in the break room. One of the murdered victims was found outside the store. Three others were taken to hospital where they died.

Tyler, who started working at Walmart two months ago and worked with Bing the night before, said she’s never had a negative encounter with him, but others have told her he’s “the manager to go with overlooked”. He said Bing wrote people for no reason.

“He liked to choose, honestly. I think he was only after little things… because he had the authority. That’s the kind of person he was. That’s what a lot of people said about him,” she said.

Employee Jessie Wilczewski told Norfolk television station WAVY that she hid under a table and Bing looked up and pointed a gun at her. He told her to go home and she left.

Police said the dead included a 16-year-old boy whose name was withheld because of his age. The other victims were identified as Brian Pendleton, 38; Kellie Pyle, 52; Lorenzo Gamble, 43; and Randy Blevins, 70, all of Chesapeake; and Tyneka Johnson, 22, from nearby Portsmouth.

It was not immediately clear if they were workers or shoppers.

Pyle was “a lovely, generous, kind person,” said Gwendolyn Bowe Baker Spencer, who said her son and Pyle plan to marry next year. Pyle had sons who grew up in Kentucky who will travel to Virginia, Spencer said.

“We love her,” Spencer said, adding, “She was a wonderful, kind person.”

The attack marked the second time in over a week that Virginia has suffered a major shooting. Three University of Virginia football players were fatally shot on a charter bus while returning to campus from a field trip on November 13. Two other students were injured.

The Walmart attack came just days after a man opened fire at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs, killing five people and wounding 17. Last spring, the country was rocked by the deaths of 21 people when a gunman entered an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. . .

Tuesday night’s shooting also recalled another attack on a Walmart in 2019, when a gunman targeting Mexicans opened fire inside a store in El Paso, Texas, killing 23 people.

A database maintained by The Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University, which tracks every mass killing in America since 2006, shows that the United States has had 40 mass killings so far in 2022. That compares with 45 in 2019 , the biggest. year in the database, which defines mass homicide as at least four people killed, not including the killer.

More than a quarter of the mass killings occurred since Oct. 21 in eight states and claimed 51 lives, according to the database. Nine of those 11 incidents were shootings.

President Joe Biden tweeted that he and the first lady were grieving, adding, “We pray for those who will have empty seats at the Thanksgiving table because of these tragic events.”

Kimberly Shupe, the mother of Walmart employee Jalon Jones, told reporters that her 24-year-old son was shot in the back. He said he is in good shape and spoke Wednesday after initially being put on a ventilator.

Shupe said he learned of the shooting from a friend, who went to a family reunification center to find out where Jones was.

“If he’s not answering his phone, he’s not answering his texts, and there’s a shooting at work, you just put two and two together,” Shupe said. “At first it was a shock, but in the end I kept thinking, ‘It’s going to be fine.’

Walmart said in a statement that it is working with law enforcement and is “focused on doing everything we can to support our associates and their families.”

In the wake of the El Paso shooting, the company decided in September 2019 to stop selling certain types of ammunition and asked customers to stop openly carrying firearms in stores.

It stopped selling handgun ammunition and rifle ammunition, such as the .223 caliber and 5.56 caliber used in military-style pistols.

The company stopped selling handguns in the mid-1990s in every state except Alaska, where sales continued through 2019. The changes marked a complete exit from that business and allowed Walmart to focus exclusively on rifles and ammunition .

Many of its stores are located in rural areas where hunters depend on Walmart to get their gear.

Tyler’s grandfather, Richard Tate, said he dropped his granddaughter off for her 10 p.m. shift, then parked the car and went to buy some dish soap.

When he first heard the shots, he thought they might be balloons. But he soon saw other customers and employees fleeing and he ran too.

Tate got into his car and called his niece.

“I could tell she was upset,” she said. “But I might as well say she’s alive.”

Associated Press writer Denise Lavoie in Chesapeake contributed to this report; Michael Kunzelman and Sarah Brumfield in Silver Spring, Maryland; Matthew Barakat in Falls Church, Virginia; Hannah Schoenbaum of Raleigh, North Carolina; Anne D’Innocenzio and Alexandra Olson in New York; news researcher Rhonda Shafner of New York; and video journalist Nathan Ellgren in Chesapeake.