NORFOLK, Va. — Whether you've tapped the news alerts from our app, clicked the headlines on our website or shared our stories on social media, we're grateful you chose 13News Now as your source for local news in 2023.
Our newsroom was honored to spend the year bringing you stories and information from across Hampton Roads, northeast North Carolina, and the Eastern Shore.
Loved ones said farewell to sailors leaving for deployment. Neighbors came together after severe storms tore through homes. We marveled over historic artifacts found at the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay. We reacted in shock and grief to tragic moments across the region, and even in one of our schools.
And every step of the way, our team of journalists were there to inform, connect, serve and celebrate our communities.
Before we say farewell to 2023, we want to take a moment to reflect on some of the biggest news in our communities this year. The following list showcases the 10 stories that were most popular with our readers online.
It's important to note that these stories are not ranked by what we deem to be newsworthy or important, but simply by the number of people who read each story. For some stories that involved multiple news articles, we lumped them together as a single entry.
Back in October, a passenger on a cruise ship sailing out of Norfolk was assaulted while on the return leg of a cruise. According to a spokesperson for Carnival Cruise Lines, this happened onboard Carnival Magic in the ship's theater. One guest reportedly attacked another guest with a bar glass.
"There were hundreds of people in the theater when it happened so everyone was pretty much worried," said Victoria Evans, a Hampton woman who was on board at the time. "The performers were up on stage and all of a sudden everyone heard... I mean, it was a blood-curdling scream, there were several of them.”
The assailant was confined to their room for the remainder of the cruise and has been permanently banned from sailing on Carnival in the future, according to the spokesperson.
A new Caribbean-themed festival drew a lot of attention this summer in Virginia Beach. The first-ever Virginia Beach Carnival brought colorful costumes, classic sounds of steel pan and drums, Caribbean cuisines, drinks, and a mega concert.
Event organizer Drew Smith, a native of Saint Thomas, said bringing Carnival to the Oceanfront was six years in the making.
Work on building a new tunnel for the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, linking Virginia Beach with the Eastern Shore, was already behind schedule. It then hit yet another roadblock... or anchor, to be more precise.
Crews tunneling the passage for the new parallel tunnel ran into an anchor that's believed to have been at the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay since the 18th or 19th century. The anchor is engraved "W.L. Byers Company" and could have been brought there by an English ship.
"It's interesting, but I wish we didn't find it," said Michael Christ, the deputy executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel Expansion Project.
The discovery meant that further progress would be delayed by up to six months as the anchor was removed piece by piece. The completion of the new tunnel is now pushed back to May of 2027.
This entry is a sad and personal one for us at 13News Now. Julie Wilcox is a familiar face for many viewers: she was a meteorologist here at WVEC for 12 years, from 2002 to 2014.
She was "a skilled meteorologist and lover of animals, especially her cats. She found forever homes for countless furry friends with her weekly 'Shelter Sunday' segments," her colleague and fellow 13News Now meteorologist Evan Stewart said.
She passed away following a long illness early this year.
A series of stories we did this year on the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group saw a large number of views, especially as conflict grew between Israel and Hamas.
The Eisenhower was scheduled to deploy in early October for the first time since 2021, but it didn't leave Naval Station Norfolk on time. No specific reason for the delay was given but the Navy said in a press release it was "to ensure the ship is in peak readiness when she joins the units from the strike group."
After the carrier strike group did set sail, it was almost immediately redirected from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Middle East in response to the fighting that had broken out between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. It was planned to join the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group in an "effort to deter hostile actions against Israel or any efforts toward widening this war following Hamas's attack on Israel."
Meanwhile, the Ford Carrier Strike Group's deployment has been extended with no word on when it will return home to Hampton Roads.
Sunday, April 30, marked the final day of the Something in the Water Festival at the Virginia Beach Oceanfront. It proved to be a stormy one but the abundance of resources on hand for the event ended up being a "blessing" when an EF-3 tornado touched down and tore across the Great Neck neighborhood of Virginia Beach before weakening to an EF-1 at Fort Story.
With winds near 150 mph, it left a four-mile stretch of damage in its wake, damaging or destroying dozens of homes. Miraculously, no injuries were reported. But a long clean-up process began, estimated to cost more than $15 million and over 100 displaced residents had to decide: rebuild or sell and move on?
The most recent story on this year's list comes from our report from December 8. A newly filed lawsuit claims a breach at a data management company used by Chesapeake-based Dollar Tree leaked the personal information of almost two million people.
The suspicious activity was allegedly discovered in August, but letters alerting past and current employees only recently started to be received.
The 50+ page lawsuit was filed by a Richmond man who used to work for the store, Kenneth Stanley. On behalf of all employees affected, he accused company executives of not only knowing about the breach but purposefully failing to notify employees.
A tragic but also not entirely unfamiliar event happened earlier this year on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel (CBBT).
On June 22, a tractor-trailer went over the CBBT, plunging into the water below. The driver, 36-year-old Christopher Scott of Henrico, was killed.
It was at least the sixth time in recent years that a large truck crashed over the side of the CBBT, which is prone to high winds over the Chesapeake Bay. These accidents are usually fatal, but in one instance from 2016, the driver survived after being in the water for over 40 minutes.
Our second most-read story of the year is also one of our most impactful: our reporting on it may have saved a Marine's life.
The wife of a Marine deployed aboard the USS Carter Hall reached out to 13News Now military reporter Mike Gooding, saying her husband's pleas for mental health help were ignored for weeks. Despite the military saying it was complying with the Brandon Act -- a law meant to help service members seeking mental health services -- the wife of Lance Corporal Alex Grzesik said his superiors repeatedly denied his request for help.
"He said, 'Please help me. They're not listening to me. I've told them everything and no one is listening,'" his wife Burke Beasley recalled.
Within hours of Gooding reaching out to officials about the situation, Grzesik was flown off his ship and taken to Bahrain for medical and psychological evaluations.
Our top story of 2023 is not for one specific article, but the full coverage of the shocking January 6 shooting of a Newport News elementary school teacher by her first-grade student that made headlines across the country.
25-year-old Abby Zwerner spent weeks recovering in the hospital after she was shot in the hand and chest while inside her classroom. The gunman was a 6-year-old boy who had brought the gun from home.
Prosecutors later said they did not believe the law supported charging the child, but his mother, Deja Taylor, later faced both state charges for felony child neglect and a federal charge of lying about marijuana use when she filled out gun permit paperwork in 2021 to buy the 9mm handgun that was later used to shoot Zwerner.
Taylor pleaded guilty to both the state and federal charges and is currently behind bars.
Meanwhile, Zwerner filed a $40 million lawsuit against several Newport News Public Schools officials, accusing them of "recklessly disregarding the safety" of everyone on school grounds for ignoring several warnings regarding the six-year-old student.
"The psychological wounds cut deeply and remain fresh," Zwerner's attorney, Diane Toscano said during a press conference on January 25.
The repercussions of the Richneck shooting continue to be felt and 13News Now will continue to cover its aftermath into 2024 and beyond.