The ceremony Friday afternoon will begin with city officials releasing the names of the 12 people killed when a gunman opened fire at the building where they worked on May 31, 2019. At the end of the ceremony, a site for a future memorial will be dedicated, and the 12 names will eventually be inscribed on the Virginia Beach landscape.
Mary Louise Gayle's children aren't planning to attend the ceremony, but her daughter, Sarah Leonard, plans to take her children camping, and her son, Matthew Gayle, plans to resume a sailing trip he cut short just five years ago when he learned there had been a shooting at his mother's workplace.
They were reluctant to partner with a city that they and some of the victims' families said had let them down. In interviews, nearly a dozen people who lost someone in the massacre or were survivors themselves said the past five years had been crazy, and that promises of help and accountability seemed to be fading fast, along with the national attention.
“They took us during tourist season,” Leonard said. What really troubled her was that her mother, like nearly all the other victims, had spent most of her career in the city.
The riot, which took place primarily at the city's Department of Public Works and Public Works, housed in a colonial brick building just steps from City Hall, was one of the deadliest incidents of workplace violence in recent U.S. history. Virginia Beach, a town of military families and beach tourists, suddenly became just another town scarred by a mass shooting.
And now, five years later, Leonard said of herself and her other family members, “None of us are any better.”
Virginia Beach Mayor Patrick Duhaney said the city has done all it can “with taxpayer money to address this horrific situation,” and spending nearly $10 million to build the memorial shows that commitment, he said.
Some families see the memorial as just a reminder of how many unresolved issues remain. Just a year ago, there was a sense that some change could be made. Families were meeting for the first time since the shootings to plan together, and it seemed as if their collective efforts might finally bring the support and accountability they had been seeking.
Now some wonder if that was naive.
“We all agreed that what happened to us was terrible, even worse than we individually initially understood,” Gale said. But in the end, he said, “there's really nothing we can do about it.”
After the shooting, grieving families began receiving various amounts of compensation — some workers' benefits based on the victims' salaries, some payments based on assessments by lawyers tasked with distributing the nearly $5 million in donations. Some of the families said they were instructed by city officials not to talk to each other about the amounts they received, but a city spokesman denied that. Some of the families, including the Gayle children, said they were advised that contacting other families would only deepen their grief. They were assured the city would take care of them.
“The mayor came to my house and said, 'We're a family,'” Gayle recalled. “He put his hand on my shoulder, he put his forehead against mine and he said, 'I know this is a terrible situation, but you don't have to worry about what's going to happen to you.'”
As new #VBStrong stickers appeared in windows across the city, life quickly resumed. Some who witnessed the killings returned to work, or, as one survivor recalled, answered calls from angry utility customers about delays to service. Families returned to their homes across the country. The following year, the pandemic hit, leaving people even more isolated as they wrestled with grief and learning the limits of the support and transparency they had hoped for.
Some have found that setting up city-sponsored centers to connect people with mental-health resources can be frustratingly bureaucratic, in part because of a federal grant program: One man said he was referred to a therapist only to be told his insurance wouldn't cover the treatment, and Leonard ended up having to pay tens of thousands of dollars out of his own pocket.
A series of official investigations — by local police, a city-hired firm and the Federal Bureau of Investigation — have found flaws in the law enforcement response but generally praised the city and concluded that the shooting was unpredictable. Some of the victims' families are horrified, arguing that the shooting, which happened right in the heart of City Hall, is a clear sign that something had gone catastrophically wrong.
Family members and coworkers had previously complained about a toxic workplace culture and raised concerns about the death of Dwayne Craddock, the suspect shot dead by police. When those complaints were raised in the report, they were said to be inconsistent with workplace survey results, which said “employees consistently report high levels of satisfaction.”
The final forum for a full investigation into the incident was a commission set up by the state Legislature to investigate the shooting, but by winter 2022, that commission had collapsed.
Then something happened.
Through a wrongful death lawsuit against Craddock's estate, Debbie Borat, sister of one of the victims, Missy Langer, obtained the apartment where Craddock was living at the time of the attack. She went there in November 2022 to clean out the apartment, only to find broken furniture and a few boxes inside. One of the boxes contained a laptop. The laptop has never been mentioned in the official investigation.
As many family members saw it, here was evidence that their doubts about the thoroughness of the investigation were justified.
The discovery came in early 2023, when nearly all the victims' families gathered in Virginia Beach to talk about lobbying the state for a $40 million fund for survivors and victims' families. It was the first time many of them had spoken to each other at length, and they realized that the frustrations they had privately harbored over the past four years were shared by others.
Virginia law was already too late to file lawsuits like those filed by family groups against authorities after other mass shootings, but the families began strategizing, meeting with lawmakers in Richmond and Washington and, on the fourth anniversary of the shooting, planning their own commemoration separate from the official city events that highlighted the heroism of the police officers who responded to the scene.
“I had hopes that something would happen, but I don't know if I was right to feel that way,” Gayle said. “Looking back, it probably wasn't.”
At the end of last year's legislative session, Virginia had established a $10 million fund to provide financial assistance to victims of mass violence — the first of its kind in the nation — but had no legislation specifically addressing those involved in the Virginia Beach shooter.
At a brief meeting in September, the few remaining members of the state commission declared their work done. They released a report full of recommendations for preparing for and responding to mass shootings but no new findings. The commission refused to give access to the laptop, saying there was no way to know who had handled it in the years since the shooting.
Some committee members alleged the city had not responded to requests for documents or interviews, charges the city denies. Two commissioners who resigned in frustration said the committee may have been purposely sabotaged by some of its members.
In early 2024, the building where the shooting occurred reopened as the city's new police headquarters.
“I feel like they were just trying to wipe us out,” said Carl Britt, a 33-year city employee who was left a quadriplegic by the shooting, “and to some extent, they succeeded.”
The Gayles are no longer on speaking terms after last year's bitter disappointment, and Leonard is now completing the paperwork to apply for state funds for victims of violence.
Gayle said he was trying to move on from the anger he felt toward Virginia Beach, a city that, on the other side of the memorial, seemed to have recovered a long time ago.
“Everywhere I walk there's a #VBstrong sticker in a window,” he says, “and when I ask people about it, they say, 'It means we love Virginia Beach.'”