The assailant was also found dead at the store, in Chesapeake, Va., according to the police.
Six people were shot and killed inside a Walmart in Chesapeake, Va., on Tuesday night, the authorities said, shattering the routine of residents who were picking up supplies for Thanksgiving during a busy holiday week.
It was the second high-profile mass shooting in the United States in three days, after five people were killed at an L.G.B.T. Q. club in Colorado Springs over the weekend.
Here’s what else to know about the shooting:
-
The assailant in the Virginia shooting, whose name the authorities did not release, was found dead at the store, Leo Kosinski, a spokesman with the Chesapeake Police Department, said in a brief news conference.
-
It was unclear how many people were wounded.
-
Mr. Kosinski said investigators did not know whether the attacker was an employee or how the person had died. He added that he did not believe any shots had been fired by police officers.
-
The city of Chesapeake said on Twitter that another news conference would be held at 8 a.m. Eastern time on Wednesday.
The attack in Virginia adds to a grim toll of mass shootings in the U.S.
Mass shootings in the United States this year have come at a pace so fast that one community has barely started mourning the losses before another takes place. The shooting at a Walmart in Chesapeake, Va., on Tuesday happened just three days after five people were killed at an L.G.B.T.Q. club in Colorado Springs.
A week earlier, three members of the University of Virginia football team were killed in Charlottesville, Va., by a former football player who opened fire in a garage, the authorities said.
The Walmart shooting was one of several attacks at American grocery stores and big-box retail outlets in recent years. In May, a teenage gunman in Buffalo shot and killed 10 people and injured three more, almost all of them Black, at a Tops supermarket, in one of the deadliest racist mass shootings in recent history.
Last year, a deadly shooting at a Boulder, Colo., supermarket left 10 people dead. Months later, another attack at a Kroger in Collierville, Tenn., about 30 miles east of Memphis, left one person dead and injured at least 14 others.
In 2019, a 21-year-old gunman stalked shoppers at a Walmart in El Paso, leaving 23 people dead and 26 others wounded. Also in 2019, a deadly rampage at the JC Kosher Supermarket in Jersey City, N.J., by two perpetrators left four people dead in an antisemitic attack.
Before 2019, only one mass shooting, in 1999, took place in a supermarket, according to research by Jillian Peterson, a professor at Hamline University, and James Densley, a professor at Metropolitan State University. Writing in The Conversation, they attribute the sharp rise in supermarket shootings to perpetrators studying others and learning from them. About half of shooters at grocery stores leaked their plans ahead of time, the researchers found.