Virginia Beach officials unveil a memorial for everyone impacted by the 2019 Municipal Center shooting.
Story By Paul Bibeau / Photos By David Uhrin & Will Hawkins
Everyone needs somewhere to be alone with his or her thoughts. No matter who you are, or what you do for a living, there is probably a spot in a park, or a booth in the corner of a coffee shop, where you go to sit for a while. We all have good days and bad days, and it’s important to find somewhere to breathe easy and reflect.
For Kimberly Millering, it has always been the Oceanfront. Millering works for the City of Virginia Beach and enjoys walking near the waves as a way to decompress. It was something she shared with her friend, Michelle “Missy” Langer.
On May 31, seven years after Missy Langer and 11 others died during the 2019 mass shooting at the city’s municipal center, Millering was at a bright, wooded place near the city government’s center, along with survivors, community members, leaders, and dozens of other friends and family of those lost to unveil a memorial for those affected by the event. This site is a 1.3-acre lot with winding pathways that make their way between the trees and stones. The team created it to be a place where the people affected by the tragedy might be able to take a moment.
Millering worked on the first floor of Building 2 at the Municipal Center, where she sheltered in place during the shooting. She talked about the difficulty of coming back to work for the city with her surviving colleagues in the days after the tragedy.
“We can’t bring back our friends,” she said.
Getting back to the job of serving the community she loves was all she could do.
Tara Reel, who also worked for Virginia Beach in 2019, sat in the audience with her small crutch, which she started using after being involved in a serious traffic accident. Her car was hit by another vehicle, hard enough that it rolled over, leaving her concussed. As her brain struggled to process what was happening, one of her very first thoughts was that she didn’t want the accident to cause her to miss this ceremony. She is a member of the 5/31 Memorial Committee, a group of more than a dozen people with an assortment of skills and stories who teamed with architects and officials to design this monument. She left her job for another post, but she will continue to come back.
“This place will always be home,” she said.
A Long Road
The unveiling of the memorial was the result of a yearslong process. In 2021, the Virginia Beach City Council voted to create the committee and appointed 13 people along with two liaison members from the council. The group had a mental health professional, experts in design and landscape architecture, and a representative from the Historical Preservation Commission. It also included those who survived the shooting and were still trying to cope with the aftermath, as well as people who lost loved ones that day. Those on this team, many of whom faced intense struggles because of the tragedy, grappled with many decisions to build something that would help everyone else who was also affected.
Because of Reel’s position with the city—she was a transportation and transit coordinator—she worked closely with many of those killed and was a regular visitor to Building 2. She joined the team to remember her friends and help her colleagues.
After Kate Nixon died, her husband Jason had to raise their three daughters on his own. Kate was “the rock behind the family,” he said, a dynamic woman who worked hard at her job and volunteer positions. His wife loved design and engineering. She came from a family of engineers and showed great aptitude for the profession. Being a single dad without this partner was incredibly daunting. The crisis forced him to step up. He threw himself into this work to highlight the accomplishments of his wife and the other people who did a crucial job that often went unrecognized.
“Public utilities, public works [are] the foundation of the city of Virginia Beach,” he said. “Without these jobs, and these divisions, you don’t have a city. You have chaos, anarchy.”
Virginia Beach Police Sergeant Brian Ricardo was one of the first of the first responders who entered Building 2 during the shooting. Because he saw the catastrophe unfold, he knew that many of the workers who died acted bravely and attempted to save others.
“I know for a fact that there were citizen heroes in that building [who] performed well before I got there,” he said. “There were people in the building who fought back against the attacker and who helped each other shelter in place.” While creating the memorial, he wanted to make certain those people were honored along with police, fire, and EMS workers. He also had personal reasons to join. His experience during the tragedy left him with PTSD, and he thought the work would help him process and recover.
Ervin Cox, Jr. didn’t intend to become part of the group at all. His brother, Ryan Keith Cox, was killed while trying to protect colleagues in the building. Ervin came to an early meeting simply to give a personal statement about a man he said was a “teddy bear,” who also had a protective streak. The committee convinced Cox to join, and he found himself helping them with their task.
The Memorial Takes Shape
The team began meeting in early 2022. According to City Council Member Michael Berlucchi, one of the liaisons, they wanted a monument that reflected the depth of the tragedy and honored those who were lost as well as the survivors. Balancing these important goals made it necessary for them to take their time and “take a very deliberate series of steps.” They reached out to families of people killed to get their input and took feedback from more than 500 citizens with online surveys, telephone calls, and in-person meetings.
Finding a designer was a crucial task, and the city held a national competition to pick a firm. The memorial committee considered a dozen options in different states before deciding to entrust the project to a Virginia Beach company, Dills Architects. Dills partnered with SWA Group, based in California.
For Clay Dills, the owner of and design principal of the local company, the project had emotional significance. He had longtime colleagues and friends who were affected by the shooting—these officials touched almost everyone who started a building project here—and he considered some of the people in Building 2 early mentors.
As the process began, the committee examined nine other monuments across the country to consider different elements they wanted to incorporate. The committee spoke to people who had worked on projects related to the tragedies in places such as El Paso, Texas, and San Bernardino, California, as well as Newtown, Connecticut. Dills said the project made him think deeply about how the event resonated with those who have experienced similar tragedies.
“We have a survivors’ grove,” Dills said. “Well, what does it mean to be a survivor? As soon as you say who is a survivor, you’ve touched communities from here to Richmond, to Washington, D.C., to North Carolina.”
The team found that aspects of some of these monuments seemed suitable for their project. SWA Group was the architectural firm for The Clearing, the Sandy Hook memorial in Connecticut, and that site featured a garden and paths that allowed people to walk through it and linger in places. The El Paso monument repurposed the candles, flowers, stuffed animals, and religious items that mourners left behind at the Walmart where 23 people died in a 2019 shooting. Eventually, the memorial in Virginia Beach would adapt some of these features, such as the use of walkways to allow people to take their time at the location, and a collection of stones painted with messages by citizens over the past few years.
Nixon was proud that the memorial was a unique product of Virginia Beach. It incorporated the materials that the people in the city’s Public Works and Public Utilities worked with week after week: earth, hydrology, and stone. This was something that those who were killed could have helped build, he noted, and he believed it connected him to the wife he lost.
“I felt that Kate was guiding me, honestly, in the design of it,” Nixon said.
The committee had to decide where to put the memorial so it would be accessible to everyone who needed it. Committee members considered several options and chose the location on the corner of Nimmo Parkway and Princess Anne Road, just at the edge of the city government complex. Reel liked this location, because it wouldn’t dominate the view of surviving city staff who had to come back to work as they recovered. It would always be available, just across the street, for them to pay a visit after work or during a break.
Cox agreed that the location was clearly the best option.
“It just spoke to us,” he said.
The Passage of Time, Persistence of Memory
In the seven years that followed, the city responded to the tragedy with yearly rituals that would happen at the end of May. The Parks and Recreation Department would paint a giant Forget-Me-Not on the side of Mount Trashmore, visible from the highway. The flower was featured in a “Love For VB” flag that would go up in front of city buildings during this period. Other locations, such as Building 30, the Virginia Beach Convention Center, and the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center, would light up blue to mark the anniversary. Meanwhile, the city considered demolishing Building 2, before finally deciding to begin major renovations in 2020 and convert the redesigned building to the headquarters of the police department. It was officially dedicated in 2024.
During that time, Reel faced her own personal obstacles. She lost both her parents. She had brain surgery for an aneurysm. And she continued to mourn friends who had been killed.
Nixon worked with her on the committee while continuing to raise three girls on his own. In 2024, his oldest daughter graduated high school near the fifth anniversary of his wife’s death. He did his best to be there for his girls, but it was difficult.
“Here I am with everything in my hands trying to figure it out,” he said. “I made a lot of mistakes, but I did a lot of good things, too. Nobody’s perfect, you know?”
The experience of working on the memorial gave Ricardo insights into the mental health challenges that first responders often face, and he brought that back into his job. As a leader on the VBPD staff, he said first responders often contend with PTSD, and people need to talk about it.
“I was always very open and very honest with everybody,” Ricardo said. “And I said, ‘Hey, look, you know, if this can impact me, it can impact you.’”
After this long interval, the committee, designers, and builders accomplished something truly good, according to Berlucchi, who said the process was “one of the finest examples of civic engagement that I’ve ever been a part of.”
‘A Promise Kept’
The ceremony to unveil the memorial began at 4 p.m., at the tail end of a warm afternoon. City Manager Patrick Duhaney read the names of those who died and then asked for a moment of silence at 4:06 p.m., the time when the first 911 call came in.
Tracy Fick, the head of Catholic Charities of Eastern Virginia, who served as a liaison immediately after the shooting, talked to those assembled about the long journey to build this place.
“For many, this memorial represents more than a place,” she said. “It represents a promise kept.”
In his address, Dills added: “We didn’t design or build this alone. It’s humbling for me to speak here about the memorial today because the input of so many others impacted by May 31st, who cared so deeply and have directly shaped this place that is now here for us.”
Near the end of the ceremony, Virginia Beach Mayor Bobby Dyer spoke to the crowd about how an unthinkable tragedy caused effects that rippled across the city and over the years.
“The impact did not stop that day,” he said. “It has lived on in the families who carry a space that can never be filled. In coworkers who walk back into offices that no longer felt the same. And in friends who still reach for a voice that they can’t call anymore. That kind of loss settles deep, and it stays. But so does something else. The way this community has shown up for one another. Year after year, you come back. Not because the pain has faded, but because love and memory are stronger than the grief.”
Unforgettable
After the ceremony was over, the people who gathered left their chairs and strolled through the shaded pathways of the memorial. They passed the entry walls, etched with lines representing the life of each victim and inscribed with a set of their initials. They walked by the grove of trees dedicated to the survivors, and rocks painted with their messages of pain and love and goodwill. They passed the massive Hero Tree, honoring everyone who saved lives, or tried to.
Nixon was careful to say that the installation was not quite complete. The team would soon be setting up 150 lights, which represented the century and a half of professional experience his wife and her colleagues brought to their service.
Cox strolled toward the reflecting pool that led to the place where his brother’s name was carved on a stone wall with the others next to a fountain. He talked about Keith, the teddy bear and grizzly, who was always protective, and would fight off bullies when the two were younger: “Brothers take care of each other.”
More than 400,000 people live in Virginia Beach. It is a large, diverse community, and the army of city employees, their families, and the people who live and work there will continue to face challenges as they try to thrive in their city tomorrow, and the day after that, and all the days ahead. There will be times when they will want to come to the memorial to sit and think about absent friends.
For his part, Cox said he was glad about what he did. He said the site was an important way to honor Keith and the others. It will still exist in a hundred years’ time.
“They’re never going to be forgotten,” Cox said.
Editor Butch Maier contributed to this story.
Butch Maier
