At least 10 people were shot and two killed in a “chaotic” night of violence in Virginia Beach, the police said early Saturday morning.
The city’s police chief, Paul Neudigate, told reporters that eight people appeared to have been shot during a single incident late on Friday night.
While officers were responding to that shooting, shots were fired elsewhere in the city, and a person was shot by a uniformed police officer, Chief Neudigate said. That person later died.
A second person was fatally shot in an incident that appeared to be unrelated to the other two, the chief said. He added that a police officer had been struck by a car and taken to a hospital with injuries that did not appear to be life-threatening.
“What you can see is that we have a very chaotic incident, a very chaotic night in the beach,” Chief Neudigate said. “Many different crime scenes.”
Several people were in custody, but it was unclear whether they had been involved in the violence, he said.
In a Twitter post just after 1 a.m. on Saturday, the department said that it was investigating a shooting in which several victims had “possibly life-threatening injuries,” and that there was a large police presence along a section of the city’s oceanfront. “Please avoid the area at this time,” it said.
A person who answered the phone at the department said that no one was available to comment.
Virginia Beach was the site of a mass shooting in May 2019, when a longtime public utilities employee opened fire on his co-workers with a handgun. He killed 12 people and injured several others, and he died after an extended shootout with the police.
Mike Baker contributed reporting.