Two police officers were shot and killed by a driver in Virginia Beach during a traffic stop on Friday night, the authorities said on Saturday. The driver was later found dead.
The officers, Cameron Girvin, 25, and Christopher Reese, 30, were assigned to a late-night shift when they stopped a car with expired plates at 11:27 p.m.
The driver was immediately “argumentative” before exiting the vehicle in a residential area and getting into a “tussle” with the officers, the Virginia Beach police said at a news conference on Saturday afternoon.
The driver, John McCoy III, 42, then shot both officers, and as they were on the ground wounded, he stood over them and shot them each a second time, Chief Paul Neudigate of the Virginia Beach Police Department said at the news conference. Both officers later died at a hospital.
“I’m going to be quite honest, we’re all hurting,” the chief said, adding, “We still have jobs to do, and we may appear stoic on the outside, but I can tell you, our hearts are broken on the inside.”
Mr. McCoy was later found in a shed near the shooting, with a gunshot wound that officers believe to be self-inflicted. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
There was a second individual in the car that Mr. McCoy had been driving but Chief Neudigate said on Saturday that the department did “not anticipate charges for anybody else in this incident.”
Officer Girvin had been a member of the Virginia Beach Police Department since 2020, and Officer Reese had been with the department since 2022, after having served as a deputy sheriff in the Virginia Beach Sheriff’s Office from 2020 to 2022, Chief Neudigate said.
The shooting was captured on video from the body-worn cameras on both officers and the camera in their patrol car, Chief Neudigate said.
He described the footage as “quite horrific” and said that the driver calmly walked away after the shooting.
The deaths of the two officers rocked Virginia Beach, a coastal city of about 450,000 near the state’s border with North Carolina. While Virginia Beach is a fairly large city, Chief Neudigate said, “we’re really just a small community.”
Mayor Bobby Dyer was emotional as he spoke at the news conference.
“Today our city is heartbroken,” he said. “No words can ease the pain and loss as we mourn.”
