Virginia Beach mass shooting details to be made public in interim police account
By Michael E. Miller, Ian Shapira and John Woodrow Cox
September 24, 2019 at 1:09 p.m. EDT
VIRGINIA BEACH After nearly four months of waiting for and, at times, demanding answers, the families of 12 people gunned down at a Virginia Beach municipal center hope to learn Tuesday night what led to the massacre. Although police have yet to complete their investigation, they plan to present to the City Council an update on what theyve learned, offering new details on the shooter and his work history as well as how the killings unfolded.
The shooter, DeWayne Craddock, had worked for nine years as a city engineer before emailing an unremarkable resignation letter to his bosses at 10:31 on the morning of May 31, a Friday. One of them accepted it 15 minutes later, according to an unredacted email obtained by The Washington Post, informing Craddock when his last day would be. Less than six hours later, as the workweek neared its end, Craddock returned with a pair of .45-caliber handguns, at least one equipped with a sound suppressor and extended magazine.
He first killed a contractor in the parking lot outside Building 2 of the sprawling Virginia Beach municipal complex, a cluster of government offices just east of a golf course. He then fatally shot a woman on her way out and used his government badge to access the buildings second floor, where he slaughtered 10 more people and wounded four others. Within minutes, authorities said, Craddock died in a shootout with police.
Two days after the attack, city manager Dave Hansen, who has since resigned, announced that a very thorough review of the gunmans personnel file had revealed no problems.
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Those statements angered some relatives of the victims, including Jason Nixon, who said that his wife, Kate, had written up the gunman for poor performance. Another time, Kate a compliance manager in the public utilities department had complained that Craddock was a chauvinist, disrespecting her because she was a woman who outranked him, her husband said.
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