The Walmart employee who the police say fatally shot six people and then killed himself on Tuesday night in Chesapeake, Va., was an off-putting manager who feared government surveillance, some of his former co-workers said.
The police identified the gunman on Wednesday as Andre Bing, 31, and said he used a pistol to carry out the shooting just after 10 p.m., about an hour before the store closes to customers. Walmart said he had been an overnight team lead employed by the company since 2010.
Former co-workers said Mr. Bing, whose shifts began at 10 p.m., oversaw employees as they unloaded pallets of groceries, stocked shelves and cleaned the store, which is part of a strip mall just off a nearby highway.
Two former co-workers recalled that Mr. Bing had covered up the camera of his phone with tape, saying he feared that the government was watching him.
“Everyone called him weird,” said Shaundrayia Reese, 27, who worked on the store’s overnight crew from roughly 2015 to 2018. “That was all anyone could say about Andre.”
Ms. Reese said that while employees largely managed to get along during shifts, Mr. Bing could be temperamental and sometimes showed a “nasty attitude,” leading to complaints from his subordinates.
Nathan Sinclair, 21, who previously worked as a manager on the shift before Mr. Bing’s, said they occasionally clashed over workplace matters, including one particularly intense argument in October over unloading a truck.
“He had an attitude,” said Mr. Sinclair, who left his job this month, just short of a year after starting there. “He was kind of aggressive. There were moments where he was OK, but he was definitely hard to work with and a little hostile.”
Mr. Sinclair said that, on most nights at about 10:15 p.m. — about the time that the shooting took place on Tuesday — Mr. Bing would assemble his team for a meeting, handing out assignments and passing along any notes from earlier shifts.
Mr. Bing seemed not to have much of a life outside of the store, according to those who knew him, including Josh Johnson, 30, a maintenance employee who worked at the store until a few years ago.
“He was the type of guy who said, ‘I go to work and go home, I don’t have social life,’” Mr. Johnson said.
Christopher Cameron and Michael Corkery contributed reporting.
