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At least 50 people were inside the Walmart in Virginia when the store manager started firing Tuesday night before killing himself. The shooter was identified as 31-year-old Andre Bing. He said that he was “armed with one handgun and had multiple magazines on his person.” Bing was an “overnight team lead” and had been employed with Walmart since 2010, the company said in a statement.
Some have begun sharing their accounts of how a calm night turned into a tragedy. Employee Kevin Harper said a colleague entered the breakroom and started shooting. “I just left out the breakroom … (the gunman) starts cappin’ people up in there,” Harper said in a Facebook Live video that is no longer on his Facebook page, but it has been re-shared on social media.
“He came in there and just started spraying,” CNN quoted Harper as saying. Jalon Jones, 24, was shot several times by the gunman, his mother, Kimberly Shupe, told CNN affiliate WTKR. Shupe addressed reporters Wednesday outside the hospital where her son was in the intensive care unit in stable condition.
Customer Jeromy Basham was at Walmart Tuesday night to buy tablecloths. Speaking about the tragedy, Basham said that he heard the sound of the gunshots and a few seconds later, people began rushing out of the store, as reported by CNN
“It sounded loud as s**t but it was so many of the same kind of sound I don’t know what the hell else it could have been,” he said in a video uploaded to his Facebook page. Basham took cover after employees warned him, “Don’t come out,” before he eventually made it outside safely.
Once outside, he saw responding officers enter the store with heavy body armor and long rifles while other witnesses and employees stood in the parking lot. In other videos from Basham, dozens of first responders were seen at the scene, CNN reported.
Joetta Jeffery said her mother, Betsy Umphlett, sent her texts from inside the store saying bullets were flying. “I’m crying, I’m shaking,” Jeffery told CNN. “I had just talked to her about buying turkeys for Thanksgiving, then this text came in,” Jeffery said her mother is not injured but traumatized by the tragedy.
John Furner, Walmart’s US president, and CEO said the mass shooting in Chesapeake was exceptionally tragic because the assailant was an employee.
Six people were shot and killed inside a Walmart store in Chesapeake, Virginia in the United States on Tuesday night, said police, reported news agency Associated Press. The shooter, whose name the police did not reveal, was found dead at the store, said Leo Kosinki, a spokesman with the Police Department, in a brief news conference. Kosinki did not specify the number of people killed in the incident but said that it was “less than 10”.
The Police Department responded to a report of a shooting inside the Walmart at about 10 pm, Mr. Kosinski said. He added that when officers entered the store, they found “multiple fatalities and multiple injured” individuals, reported the New York Times.
He also said that the investigators did not know if the shooter was an employee at the store or whether he died by suicide and added that he did not believe that any shots had been fired by police officers.
It was the second high-profile shooting in a handful of days. A person opened fire at a gay nightclub in Colorado late Saturday, killing five people and wounding 17. The shootings come in a year when the country was shaken by the deaths of 21 when a gunman stormed an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
Tuesday’s shooting also brought back memories of another at a Walmart in 2019, when a gunman police say was targeting Mexicans opened fire at a store in El Paso and killed 22 people.
The shooting at the Virginia Walmart stopped when the police arrived, the AP report stated. Mike Kafka, a spokesman for Sentara Healthcare, said in a text message that five patients from Walmart were being treated at Norfolk General Hospital. Their conditions were not immediately available, the report added. Walmart tweeted early Wednesday that it was “shocked at this tragic event.”
(With Inputs from CNN)
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