In a Saturday morning press conference, Virginia Beach City Manager Dave Hansen read the names of the victims, many of whom were longtime public works and public utilities employees in the area:
Just after 4 p.m. on Friday, police were alerted to shots fired at the city office building, which is part of a large municipal government complex downtown.
According to Police Chief James A. Cervera, an employee had entered the building and began firing indiscriminately at staffers on multiple floors using what is believed to have been .45-caliber handgun with a silencer.
Four officers confronted him at the scene and exchanged fire in what Cervera called a “long-term gun battle,” after which the shooter died.
On Saturday, officials identified the suspect as DeWayne Craddock, a 40-year-old public utilities engineer who had access to the building via a security pass, CNN and The New York Times reported.
According to The Associated Press, Craddock was a military veteran described by neighbors as a taciturn man who rarely smiled.
Two months before the shooting on March 30, police had conducted mass shooting training in an effort to prepare for large-scale emergencies, CNN reported.
However, Cervera emphasized that real-life situations are different.
“While we train extensively, while we go over all of our protocols extensively, once you enter an environment such as this, everything changes,” he said. “Things change in a moment’s notice, such as the gun battle with the suspect. So we did train as recent as March 30, but officers had to make instantaneous decisions at that moment in time on how to engage the suspect.”
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