Chesapeake Walmart shooter Andre Bing purchased the 9 mm handgun he used to kill six co-workers on the morning of the Tuesday shooting, according to local police, who also released the details of the “Death note” he left on his cellphone.
“I was harassed by idiots with low intelligence and a lack of wisdom. I remained strong through most of it, but my dignity was completely taken away beyond repair by my phone getting hacked,” Bing, 31, wrote in the note, which was made public by Chesapeake Police on Friday.
The “phone getting hacked” line is consistent with something a former co-worker, Shaundrayia Reese, recalled about Bing, saying he was “always saying the government was watching him. He didn’t like social media, and he kept black tape on his phone camera.”
“Everyone always thought something was wrong with him,” Reese told CNN.
Described by former co-workers as a loner, Bing had no readily apparent social-media presence, and didn’t have a criminal record or traffic violations.
This would be why it would have been easy for Bing to pass the background check needed to buy a handgun.
The odd and vaguely threatening behaviors described by Bing’s co-workers wouldn’t factor in to whether he’d be able to buy a gun.
One co-worker, Donya Prioleau, who was in the breakroom when Bing started firing, said Bing was “condescending when he spoke to us. He didn’t have good communication skills. He was quite mean to a lot of us.”
There was clearly something else going on with Bing that he’d been able to mask from the world for years, as he seemed to admit in his “Death note,” writing that he had “failed (the) management team and everyone that ever loved me by convincing them that I was normal.”
Reading the “Death note,” Bing was anything but “normal.”
He wrote that his co-workers “made subtle code speeches which I eventually figured out,” and that he overheard two co-workers talking about how one had “been trying to get rid of me since day one.
“After I heard that, I lashed out.”
“The associates gave me evil, twisted grins, mocked me and celebrated my downfall the last day. That’s why they suffer the same fate as me.”
The shootings transpired in an employee breakroom shortly after 10 p.m., as employees gathered for a routine briefing before beginning an overnight shift.
There has been no indication from Walmart that Bing, the shift’s supervisor, was under any kind of threat of change of employment status, though he was obviously very much under that impression.
A former co-worker, Joshua Johnson, told CNN that Bing had said that “if he ever got fired from his job, he would retaliate, and people would remember who he was.”
“My true intent was never to murder anyone. Believe it or not, I was actually one of the most loving people in the world if you would get to know me. I just wanted a wife that was equally yoked as I and obsessed over the thought; however, I didn’t deserve a wife,” Bing wrote.
“My only wish would have been to start over from scratch and that my parents would have paid closer attention to my social deficits,” he went on.
“Sorry, everyone, but I did not plan this. I promise things just fell in place like I was led by the Satan,” Bing wrote.
He concluded the note with the chilling line: “My God, forgive me for what I’m going to do.”
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Chris Graham
