Randall Blevins, known as Randy, was seventy. Fernando Chavez-Barron was sixteen years old, working at Walmart as one of his first jobs. Tyneka Johnson was twenty-two. Lorenzo Gamble was forty-three. Brian Pendleton was thirty-eight. Kellie Pyle was fifty-two. They were stockers, an overnight team. They came in after most of America had gone to bed and they left before most of America had had breakfast. Their job was to make sure that when a customer walked into the Chesapeake store the next morning, the shelves were full. Three of them had families waiting at home for the holiday meal. One of them was sixteen years old and working to help his family. The gunman had bought a 9mm pistol that morning and had been practicing with targets - police found the targets later in his Chevrolet Silverado.

Bing was targeting specific coworkers - some witnesses said he would continue shooting at people who were already down to make sure they were dead. When he saw a new hire who had been on the job for only five days, he told her to go home and did not shoot her. He left a death note on his phone. In it he wrote about feeling led by Satan, about cancer treatments and loneliness, about wanting a wife and believing he did not deserve one. He had no criminal record. Coworkers later said he had been difficult and hostile to others, and survivors filed multiple $50 million lawsuits against Walmart alleging that the company had been warned about his behavior. At least one of those lawsuits was dismissed with prejudice in early 2024. Others were settled or moved forward. The store closed for nearly five months, reopening on April 19, 2023, with a redesigned floor plan and a small memorial space. That memorial is no longer there.

Fernando was the youngest person killed - sixteen, still in high school. The news that night identified him only as a juvenile because of his age, and his name was not released until later. He had been working at Walmart to help his family. The news photos that ran after the shooting showed a young man with a small smile, taken at a moment that had nothing to do with what happened to him later. Senator Mark Warner, who said he was sickened by the shooting, was one of many Virginia officials who specifically named the sixteen-year-old in their statements. A boy who should have been at home eating his mother's cooking the next week was instead lying in a Walmart break room. The story does not give you a way to soften that fact, and it should not.

It took first responders thirty-five to forty minutes to clear the building. Officers had to move room by room through a store the size of a city block, looking for a shooter who they did not yet know was already dead. There were multiple victims throughout the building, including one near the entrance. The overnight team had been doing routine work - planning shelf restocking, going over inventory - and the routine made the violence read as something out of the ordinary fabric of life. Walmart is everywhere; this Walmart was one anyone in Chesapeake might have shopped at. Senator Warner said he was sickened. President Biden offered condolences. The country had had another mass shooting at a place where people just went to work, and would have more.

The memorial Walmart built when it reopened the store is gone now, removed at some point after the renovation. The lawsuits are working through the courts. The store is open. People go in to buy diapers and milk, and most of them do not know what happened in the break room three years ago. The names of Randy Blevins, Fernando Chavez-Barron, Tyneka Johnson, Lorenzo Gamble, Brian Pendleton, and Kellie Pyle exist now in news articles, in court records, in the memories of their families. They were not warriors and they were not famous. They were Walmart employees on the overnight shift, three days before Thanksgiving, in a store off Battlefield Boulevard in Chesapeake, Virginia. The thing to do, when you fly over this part of the city, is to know that.