CHESAPEAKE, Va. — A Walmart executive who shot and killed six co-workers in Virginia appeared to be targeting people and shot some of the victims after they were already wounded and appeared dead, a witness who was present when the shooting began said.
Jessica Wilczewski said workers had gathered in the store’s break room to start the night shift Tuesday night when crew leader Andre Bing walked in and opened fire with a handgun. While another witness described Bing as shooting wildly, Wilczewski said she watched him target certain people.
“The way he was behaving — he was going hunting,” Wilczewski told The Associated Press on Thursday. “The way he looked at people’s faces and the way he did what he did, he picked people.”
She said she saw him shooting people who were already lying on the ground.
“What I do know is that he made sure the one he wanted was dead,” she said. “He came back and shot the bodies that were already dead. To make sure that.”
Wilczewski said she had only worked at the store for five days and did not know who Bing was getting along with or had problems with. She said the fact that she was a new employee may have been the reason he took pity on her.
She said that after the shooting started, a colleague sitting next to her dragged her under the table to hide. She said at one point Bing told her to get out from under the table. But when he saw who she was, he said to her, “Jesse, go home.” She said she slowly got up and then ran out of the store.
The police are investigating the motive. It was the second mass shooting in the country in four days. The gunman was dead when officers arrived late Tuesday at a convenience store in Chesapeake, Virginia’s second-largest city. Authorities said he apparently shot himself.
Police identified the victims as Brian Pendleton, 38; Kelly Pyle, 52; Lorenzo Gamble, 43; and Randy Blevins, 70, all of Chesapeake; and Tyneka Johnson, 22, from nearby Portsmouth. They said a 16-year-old boy, whose name has not been released because of his age, was also among the dead.
A Walmart spokesperson confirmed in an email that all of the victims worked for the company.
Crystal Kawabata, a spokeswoman for the FBI field office in Norfolk, Va., confirmed that the agency was assisting police in the investigation, but she referred all inquiries to the Chesapeake Police Department, the lead investigative agency.
Another Walmart employee, Brianna Tyler, said that Bing was working randomly.
“He was just shooting all over the room. It didn’t matter who he hit,” Briana Tyler, a Walmart employee, told the AP on Wednesday.
Six people were also wounded in the shooting, which happened just after 10 p.m. as shoppers were stocking up ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday. Police said about 50 people were in the store at the time.
The gunman was identified as 31-year-old Bing, a night supervisor who had worked at Walmart since 2010. Police said he had one handgun and several magazines of ammunition.
Tyler said the night stocking team of 15 to 20 people had just gathered in the break room to go over the morning’s plan. Another team leader started talking when Bing entered the room and opened fire, Tyler and Wieczewski said.
Tyler, who started at Walmart two months ago and had only worked with Bing the night before, said she never had a negative encounter with him, but others told her he was “a manager to watch out for.” She said Bing had previously recorded people for no reason.
The attack was the second mass shooting in Virginia in just over a week. Three University of Virginia football players were fatally injured on a charter bus as they returned to campus from a field trip on Nov. 13. Two other students were injured.
The Walmart attack comes days after a man opened fire at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs, killing five people and injuring 17. Tuesday night’s shooting also brought back memories of another Walmart attack in 2019, when a gunman , which targeted Mexicans, opened A store fire in El Paso, Texas, killed 23 people.
The Associated Press, USA Today and Northeastern University database, which tracks all mass murders in America since 2006, shows that in 2022 there will be 40 mass murders in the US. That compares with 45 for all of 2019, the highest number. year in a database that identifies a mass murder of at least four people, excluding the killer.
Earlier this year, the country was shocked by the deaths of 21 people when a gunman stormed an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
