At approximately 4:08 p.m. on May 31, 2019, DeWayne Antonio Craddock, a 40-year-old city employee in the public utilities department, began shooting inside Building 10 of the Virginia Beach Municipal Center — a courthouse and city office complex in Virginia Beach, Virginia. The attack lasted approximately 36 minutes, ending at 4:44 p.m. when Craddock was killed in an exchange of gunfire with arriving police officers. Twelve people were killed — eleven city employees and one contractor performing permit work inside the building — and four others were wounded, including a police officer who was shot in the ballistic vest and survived.
The shooting became the second-deadliest workplace shooting in U.S. history, following the 1986 Edmond post office shooting, and the deadliest mass shooting in Virginia's recorded history. Craddock had submitted his resignation by email hours before the attack, according to sources citing the Virginian-Pilot. The FBI Norfolk field office described the attack as rooted in perceived workplace grievances — a characterization sourced from a press release the field office published, which was not independently accessible during this research session (HTTP 403 — attribution required).
The city's independent review, conducted by the firm Hillard Heintze and commissioned by the City of Virginia Beach, was published in November 2019. It documented the timeline and response in detail. The review noted it could not fully resolve questions about whether warning signs may have been present in Craddock's employment record — characterizing this as a gap between documented conditions and actionable prevention signals. The Hillard Heintze report identified systemic gaps in how employee complaints were logged and acted upon, though it did not identify any single missed opportunity as determinative in preventing the attack. Six of the victims worked alongside Craddock in the public utilities department, a detail that drew scrutiny to the workplace dynamics preceding the attack.