Five Years After Virginia Beach Shooting, ‘No One Is Getting Better’

The ceremony on Friday afternoon will begin with the naming of the 12 people who were killed on May 31, 2019, when an embittered city employee carried out a shooting spree at the building where he worked. At the end of the event, the site of a future memorial will be dedicated, where, eventually, the 12 names will be etched into the landscape of Virginia Beach.

The children of Mary Louise Gayle, whose name will be among them, have no plans to be at the ceremony. Sarah Leonard, her daughter, is taking her children camping. Matthew Gayle, her son, is resuming a sailing trip he cut short exactly five years earlier when he learned of a shooting at his mother’s workplace.

They could not bring themselves to join hands with a city that they, and members of some of other victims’ families, say let them down. In interviews, nearly a dozen people who lost someone in the massacre, or survived it themselves, described the last five years as maddening, saying that public promises of support and accountability seemed to fade away rapidly, along with the country’s attention.

“They washed us away with the tourist season,” Ms. Leonard said. What troubled her so much was that her mother, along with nearly all the other victims, had spent most of her career with the city.

The rampage, which mostly unfolded in the city’s Departments of Public Utilities and Public Works, in a colonial brick building just steps from City Hall, was one of the deadliest episodes of workplace violence in recent U.S. history. A city of military families and beach tourism, Virginia Beach suddenly became another community scarred by a mass shooting.

And five years later, Ms. Leonard said, speaking of herself and the other families, “no one is getting better.”