Virginia police: Multiple people killed in Walmart shooting

CHESAPEAKE, Va. (AP) — Multiple people are dead and others are wounded after a shooting at a Virginia Walmart on Tuesday night, police said.

Officers responded to a report of a shooting at the Walmart on Sam’s Circle around 10:15 p.m. and as soon as they arrived they found evidence of a shooting, Chesapeake police spokesman Leo Kosinski said in a briefing.

Over 35 to 40 minutes, officers found multiple dead people and injured people in the store and put rescue and tactical teams together to go inside and provide life-saving measures, he said.

Police believe there was one shooter, who is dead, he said. They believe that the shooting had stopped when police arrived, Kosinski said. He did not have a number of dead, but said it was “less than 10, right now.”

Kosinski said he doesn’t believe police fired shots, but he could not say whether the shooter was dead of a self-inflicted gunshot.

Mike Kafka, a spokesman for Sentara Healthcare, said in a text message that five patients from the Walmart are being treated at Norfolk General Hospital. Their conditions weren’t immediately available.

The Virginia shooting comes three days after a gunman opened fire at a gay nightclub in Colorado, killing five people and wounding 17. That shooter was arrested after patrons at the club tackled him and beat him. The shootings come in a year when the country was shaken by the deaths of 21 in a school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

Tuesday’s shooting also brought back memories of another shooting 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. Walmart didn’t have a security guard on duty that day.

Sen. Mark Warner tweeted that he is “sickened by reports of yet another mass shooting, this time at a Walmart in Chesapeake.” Sen. Louise Lucas echoed Warner’s sentiment tweeting that she was “absolutely heartbroken that America’s latest mass shooting took place in a Walmart in my district.”

Chesapeake police tweeted that a family reunification site has been set up at the Chesapeake Conference Center. This site is only for immediate family members or the emergency contact of those who may have been in the building, the tweet said.

Chesapeake is about 7 miles (11 kilometers) south of Norfolk.