Virginia Walmart Employees Slain in Shooting Are Mourned

Several other people were injured in the shooting. A spokesman for Sentara Norfolk General Hospital said Thursday that two victims remained in critical condition. A third victim was released from the hospital Wednesday.

The shooting occurred late Tuesday night during a busy Thanksgiving week in the city of Chesapeake, about 5 miles south of downtown Norfolk, Va. Police said Andre Bing, 31, opened fire with a handgun less than an hour before the store was set to close. At least 50 people were in the store at the time, police said.

The suspect, who was carrying several ammunition magazines, then fatally shot himself and was dead by the time authorities arrived, police said. A number of his victims were shot in the store’s break room. A Walmart spokesman said the suspect had worked at the company since 2010.

Authorities have yet to release a possible motive for the killings.

Two people who had worked with Mr. Bing told The Wall Street Journal that he could be combative and difficult to work with and recounted how he would cover his cellphone camera with tape because he said he worried the government was tracking him.

“I always knew something was wrong with him, but I never thought he would do something like this,” said Shaundrayia Reese, who said that she had worked at the Walmart until 2018.

A makeshift memorial in front of the store grew in size Thursday, as locals placed orange pinwheels and flower bouquets on the ground. Virginia State Police officers and agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation were on the scene early Thursday afternoon.

A tow truck carrying six white wooden crosses each about 8-feet tall arrived Thursday afternoon and were placed next to the makeshift memorial. Matt Cilento, owner of Hickory Towing, said employees expressed to him that they wanted to show support for the victims and their families, so they came up with the idea of building the crosses.

“Hopefully, this brings a bit of closure to them,” Mr. Cilento said of the victims’ families. “It’s just terrible. You never expect something like this to happen so close to home.”

Mr. Cilento, who said he was an officer with the Chesapeake Police Department from 2000 to 2007, said he sympathized with the emergency-response workers who have been responding to the shooting and its aftermath.

“They’re not sleeping tonight, these guys are the first ones in the door,” he said of responding officers. “Nothing can prepare you for that.”

The Virginia shooting came days after an attacker opened fire on patrons at an LGBT nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colo., killing five. The White House said President Biden and first lady Jill Biden called the club’s owners to offer condolences and reiterate their commitment to fighting back against hate and gun violence.

Speaking to reporters in Nantucket, Mass., Mr. Biden said that he was “sick and tired” of the shootings and that there was no reason semiautomatic weapons should be available for sale.

Mr. Biden said he would continue to work on banning such weapons, saying that he would assess what is possible in Congress’s lame-duck session, which occurs between the recent elections and the next session starting in January.

“I’ve got to make that assessment as I get in and start counting the votes,” he said.

New gun legislation has little chance of advancing during the lame-duck session. In the 50-50 Senate, most Republicans are resistant to new gun restrictions, and the longstanding filibuster rule requires 60 votes for most bills to advance.

In the next Congress, Republicans will take control of the House, meaning there is likely no path for more-restrictive gun laws.

A 1994 assault-weapons ban, championed by Mr. Biden when he served in the Senate, lapsed nearly two decades ago.

In June, Mr. Biden signed a bipartisan gun bill into law. That legislation, the most substantial in decades, includes a requirement that background checks cover the juvenile and mental-health records of gun purchasers under 21 years of age. It imposes new criminal penalties on straw purchases, or buying a gun for someone not permitted to, and gun trafficking.

The measure also encourages states to enact extreme-risk protection orders, also known as red-flag laws, to allow courts to order guns to be removed temporarily from people deemed dangerous. Mr. Biden complained Thursday that red-flag laws weren’t being enforced.

The Colorado shooting suspect, Anderson Lee Aldrich, was arrested on two counts of felony menacing and three counts of first-degree kidnapping a year earlier after threatening family members at gunpoint, according to law-enforcement officials. The case never proceeded, and officials didn’t use a state red-flag law to seize weapons from the suspect, which drew questions from state lawmakers following the nightclub shooting.

Write to Konrad Putzier at [email protected], Bryan Mena at [email protected] and Catherine Lucey at [email protected]