A Wal­mart man­ag­er opened fire on fel­low em­ploy­ees in the break room of a Vir­ginia store, killing six peo­ple in the coun­try’s sec­ond high-pro­file mass shoot­ing in four days, po­lice and a wit­ness said Wednes­day.

The gun­man, who ap­par­ent­ly shot him­self, was dead when po­lice found him, Chesa­peake Po­lice Chief Mark G. Solesky said. There was no clear mo­tive for the shoot­ing, which al­so put four peo­ple in the hos­pi­tal.

The store was busy just be­fore the at­tack Tues­day night as peo­ple stocked up ahead of the Thanks­giv­ing hol­i­day, a shop­per told a lo­cal TV sta­tion.

Em­ploy­ee Bri­ana Tyler said work­ers had gath­ered in the break room as they typ­i­cal­ly did ahead of their shifts.

“I looked up, and my man­ag­er just opened the door and he just opened fire,” she told ABC’s “Good Morn­ing Amer­i­ca,” adding that “mul­ti­ple peo­ple” dropped to the floor.

“He didn’t say a word, he didn’t say any­thing at all,” she said.

Solesky con­firmed that the shoot­er, who used a pis­tol, was a Wal­mart em­ploy­ee but did not give his name be­cause his fam­i­ly had not been no­ti­fied. The po­lice chief could not con­firm whether the vic­tims were all em­ploy­ees.

Em­ploy­ee Jessie Wilczews­ki told Nor­folk tele­vi­sion sta­tion WAVY that she hid un­der the ta­ble and the shoot­er looked at her with his gun point­ed at her, told her to go home and she left.

“It didn’t even look re­al un­til you could feel the ... ‘pow-pow-pow,’ you can feel it,” Wilczews­ki said. “I couldn’t hear it at first be­cause I guess it was so loud, I could feel it.”

Gov. Glenn Youngkin tweet­ed that he was in con­tact with law en­force­ment of­fi­cials in Chesa­peake, Vir­ginia’s sec­ond-largest city, which lies next to the sea­side com­mu­ni­ties of Nor­folk and Vir­ginia Beach.

“Our hearts break with the com­mu­ni­ty of Chesa­peake this morn­ing,” Youngkin wrote. “Heinous acts of vi­o­lence have no place in our com­mu­ni­ties.”

It was the sec­ond time in a lit­tle more than a week that Vir­ginia has ex­pe­ri­enced a ma­jor shoot­ing. Three Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia foot­ball play­ers were fa­tal­ly shot on a char­ter bus as they re­turned to cam­pus from a field trip on Nov. 13. Two oth­er stu­dents were wound­ed.

“I am dev­as­tat­ed by the sense­less act of vi­o­lence that took place late last night in our city,” May­or Rick W. West said in a state­ment post­ed on the city’s Twit­ter ac­count Wednes­day. “Chesa­peake is a tight-knit com­mu­ni­ty, and we are all shak­en by this news.”

A data­base run by The As­so­ci­at­ed Press, USA To­day and North­east­ern Uni­ver­si­ty that tracks every mass killing in Amer­i­ca go­ing back to 2006 shows this year has been es­pe­cial­ly vi­o­lent.

The U.S. has now had 40 mass killings so far in 2022, com­pared with 45 for all of 2019. The data­base de­fines a mass killing as at least four peo­ple killed, not in­clud­ing the killer.

The at­tack at the Wal­mart came three days af­ter a per­son opened fire at a gay night­club in Col­orado, killing five peo­ple and wound­ing 17. Last spring, the coun­try was shak­en by the deaths of 21 when a gun­man stormed an el­e­men­tary school in Uvalde, Texas.

Tues­day night’s shoot­ing al­so brought back mem­o­ries of an­oth­er at a Wal­mart in 2019, when a gun­man who tar­get­ed Mex­i­cans opened fire at a store in El Pa­so, Texas, and killed 22 peo­ple.

A 911 call about the shoot­ing came in just af­ter 10 p.m. Solesky did not know how many shop­pers were in­side, whether the gun­man was work­ing or whether a se­cu­ri­ty guard was present.

Joet­ta Jef­fery told CNN that she re­ceived text mes­sages from her moth­er who was in­side the store when the shots were fired. Her moth­er, Bet­sy Umphlett, was not in­jured.

“I’m cry­ing, I’m shak­ing,” Jef­fery said. “I had just talked to her about buy­ing turkeys for Thanks­giv­ing, then this text came in.”

One man was seen wail­ing at a hos­pi­tal af­ter learn­ing that his broth­er was dead, and oth­ers shrieked as they left a con­fer­ence cen­tre set up as a fam­i­ly re­uni­fi­ca­tion cen­tre, The Vir­gin­ian-Pi­lot re­port­ed.

Camille Bug­gs, a for­mer Wal­mart em­ploy­ee, told the news­pa­per she went to the con­fer­ence cen­tre seek­ing in­for­ma­tion about her for­mer co-work­ers.

“You al­ways say you don’t think it would hap­pen in your town, in your neigh­bour­hood, in your store — in your favourite store, and that’s the thing that has me shocked,” Bug­gs said.

Wal­mart tweet­ed ear­ly Wednes­day that it was “shocked at this trag­ic event.”

In the af­ter­math of the El Pa­so shoot­ing, Wal­mart made a de­ci­sion in Sep­tem­ber 2019 to dis­con­tin­ue sales of cer­tain kinds of am­mu­ni­tion and asked that cus­tomers no longer open­ly car­ry firearms in its stores.

It stopped sell­ing hand­gun am­mu­ni­tion as well as short-bar­rel ri­fle am­mu­ni­tion, such as the .223 cal­i­bre and 5.56 cal­i­bre used in mil­i­tary style weapons. Wal­mart al­so dis­con­tin­ued hand­gun sales in Alas­ka.

The com­pa­ny had stopped sell­ing hand­guns in the mid-1990s in every state but Alas­ka. The lat­est move marked its com­plete ex­it from that busi­ness and al­lowed it to fo­cus on hunt­ing ri­fles and re­lat­ed am­mu­ni­tion on­ly.

Many of its stores are in rur­al ar­eas where hunters de­pend on Wal­mart to get their equip­ment. —CHESA­PEAKE, Va. (AP)

___

Sto­ry by ALEX BRAN­DON | The As­so­ci­at­ed Press