Six people were shot dead in an employee breakroom at a Walmart store in Chesapeake Tuesday night, and the shooter, believed to be a store manager, later took his own life.
Four other people were wounded in the attack, which unfolded at 10:12 p.m. as employees on the night shift were meeting to get their assignments for the day.
“I looked up, and my manager just opened the door, and he just opened fire,” employee Briana Tyler told “Good Morning America.” “He wasn’t aiming at anybody specifically. He just literally started shooting throughout the entire breakroom, and I watched multiple people just drop down to the floor, where they were trying to duck for cover, or they were hit.”
Tyler said the shooter fired at her, but “luckily missed.”
“He didn’t say a word, he didn’t say anything at all,” she said.
Another employee, Kevin Harper, posted a Facebook Live after the shooting also identifying the shooter as a manager at the store.
“Blew people’s brains out and everything,” he said. “He came in and just started spraying and shit.”
“I’d just left out of the break room, manager come up in there, started capping people up in there, started shooting, bro. The manager came in, started dumping, man. As soon as I left out the breakroom he went in there, man. That shit wild.”
Fellow survivors talked with Harper in the video as they tried to process what had happened.
“Manager guy? Why he shoot everybody?” one employee said.
“I seen brains,” a woman said, crying as she was being asked if she was all right.
A third employee told WAVY TV that there were 14 employees in a meeting room waiting to be given their assignments for the day when gunfire erupted.
The woman claimed the gunman “had issues” with other managers at the store, leading her to believe the shooting was planned.
“It didn’t even look real until you could feel the gun go off,” she said.
Chesapeake Police Chief Mark Solesky confirmed at a Wednesday morning press conference that the shooter, who still hasn’t been publicly identified, was an employee at the store, and that he used a pistol to carry out the attack.
The shooting was over when police arrived on the scene.
“We go inside and to make a long story short, over the course of the next 30-45 minutes we were able to find multiple fatalities and multiple injured parties,” police department spokesman Leo Kosinski said.
The Walmart was reportedly teeming with shoppers as the violence erupted in the back of the store.
“People were being very friendly, talking about Thanksgiving—what they had to do, what they had to get,” one shopper told local station ABC 13, saying she had seen long checkout lines and a full parking lot shortly before 9 p.m.
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Chris Graham
