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This article is more than 1 year old

Three people who were wounded in the Virginia Beach shooting remained in critical condition on Sunday, two days after a gunman opened fire in a municipal government building, killing 12.

A mass shooting couldn’t happen in Virginia Beach … until it did Read more

The other wounded survivor “is in much better condition”, the Virginia Beach police chief, James Cervera, told ABC’s This Week, adding: “Our fingers are crossed and our prayers are going out that that winds up in a positive outcome for all of them.”

The injured survivors have not been named. On Saturday the head of trauma at a Virginia Beach hospital told reporters one of the wounded had not required urgent care, “but if the injury were a little further over he probably wouldn’t be here today”.

Eleven city employees and a contractor were killed.

Four were engineers who worked to maintain streets and protect wetlands. Three were right-of-way agents who reviewed property lines. The others were an account clerk, a technician, an administrative assistant and a special projects coordinator.

“They leave a void we will never be able to fill,” the city manager, Dave Hansen, said on Saturday.

One of the dead, Christopher Kelly Rapp of Powhatan, enjoyed Scottish music and played in the Tidewater Pipes & Drums band. Another, Mary Louise Gayle of Virginia Beach, “would always be out there in the yard, working on something and talking to my daughters”, her neighbor told the New York Times.

The others who were killed were Tara Welch Gallagher, Alexander Mikhail Gusev, Katherine A Nixon, Ryan Keith Cox, Joshua O Hardy, Michelle “Missy” Langer and Herbert “Bert” Snelling, all of Virginia Beach; Laquita C Brown and Robert “Bobby” Williams, both of Chesapeake; and Richard H Nettleton of Norfolk.

The police and fire departments assigned members of their honor guards to help each victim’s family. Hundreds of people attended prayer vigils for the dead.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Top row from left: Laquita C Brown, Ryan Keith Cox, Tara Welch Gallagher and Mary Louise Gayle. Middle row from left: Alexander Mikhail Gusev, Joshua A Hardy, Michelle ‘Missy’ Langer and Richard H Nettleton. Bottom row from left: Katherine A Nixon, Christopher Kelly Rapp, Herbert ‘Bert’ Snelling and Robert ‘Bobby’ Williams. Photograph: AP

The gunman was also a local government employee. After identifying him, Cervera and other civic leaders said they would not refer to him by name again.

Cervera told ABC officers responding late on Friday afternoon had “begun to clear out the first floor” of the three-floor municipal building when they “realized where the suspect was on an additional floor” and “immediately engaged with him”.

“It was a long gun battle … what we would call a long firefight,” he said. “They stood their ground. They held their ground. He was moving, they were moving, this wasn’t something that you would think of in most police officer-involved shootings … it was real, it was violent, it was going on.

“Those cops stuck themselves in that place to stop him from committing more carnage in that building. One officer was wounded. I checked with him yesterday, he’s doing just fine. And they were able to take the individual down.”

Officers attempted to save the gunman’s life, Cervera said.

“We’re now interviewing co-workers,” he said, “witnesses, family members, anyone who will step forward maybe to give us some additional background.”

At a press conference in Virginia Beach, Hansen said the gunman gave notice of his resignation hours before the shooting.

“He notified his chain of command that morning,” Hansen said. “My understanding is he did that via email.”

City officials were “determining where that letter is”, Hansen said, adding that the gunman’s work as an engineer had been thought “satisfactory” and he had been considered “in good standing” and without any disciplinary issues.

The gunman accessed the building with his security pass. He used two handguns, which officials said were both purchased legally, as was another weapon found at the gunman’s home. Authorities also said the gunman used a sound suppressor.

Asked if reforms were needed to make such lethal accessories harder to acquire, Cervera told ABC: “The sound suppressor is just that. So someone in one end of the building would not have heard a gunshot going off as opposed to another end of the building. But again, this is a very large building. That might not have been an issue in this particular case.”

Of wider efforts for gun control reform, for example on background checks or restrictions on certain weapons, Cervera said: “I don’t think most of that would have mattered in this particular case.

“We do have the second amendment, it is very stringent for our country. In this particular case the weapons were obtained legally, everything was done in a legal manner by this individual.”

At the gunman’s home, a handwritten note expressed condolences to the victims on behalf of the gunman’s family. The note was taped to the front door of the two-storey house on the wooded road where he lived, about an hour from Virginia Beach.

The 40-year-old’s family, it read, “wishes to send our heart felt condolences to the victims. We are grieving the loss of our loved one.”

The note also said the family wanted to focus on the victims of the shootings and offered thoughts and prayers for the relatives of the dead and wounded.