Virginia police respond to the scene of a fatal shooting at a Walmart on Tuesday night.Credit:WAVY TV/AP
“It didn’t even look real until you could feel the pow-pow-pow. You can feel it,” the store employee said. “I couldn’t hear it at first because I guess it was so loud. I could feel it.”
Tuesday’s bloodshed marked the latest spasm of gun violence in the United States,where an average of two mass shootings -- defined as an incident killing or injuring four or more people -- occur every day,according to GunViolenceArchive.org.
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Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin,who was already facing stepped-up calls for policies to address gun violence in the wake of the University of Virginia killings,ordered flags at local,state and federal buildings to be flown at half-staff.
Kimberly Shupe told WAVY-TV that her son Jalon Jones,24,was stable after being shot in his ear and back. He told her that he arrived for his overnight shift around 10pm,and that in their nightly meeting his manager was acting “strange” and “then started shooting,” she told the news station
Dr Jessica Burgess,a surgeon who treated victims at a Norfolk hospital where two people died,two were in critical condition and one was recovering,said she contacted a colleague in Colorado Springs just two days prior to offer support.
“So it’s very disheartening that I’m now in the same position with my colleagues from across the country checking in on me and my team,” Burgess said. “Sometimes there is only so much we can do when the injuries have already been done.”
It is not the first mass shooting at a Walmart,which has thousands of stores across the country.
At a Walmart in El Paso,Texas,in August 2019,23 people were killed in a mass shooting near the U.S.-Mexico border in an act described as domestic terrorism by law enforcement. It was also the deadliest attack on the Hispanic community in modern times. Patrick Wood Crusius,then 21,from Allen,Texas,was arrested in the shooting and he left behind a manifesto with white nationalist and anti-immigrant themes.
“The devastating news of last night’s shooting at our Chesapeake,VA store at the hands of one of our associates has hit our Walmart family hard,” Walmart Chief Executive Officer Doug McMillon wrote in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday.
Reuters