Two local TV reporters were shot dead in the midst of a live broadcast in Virginia on Wednesday, the victims o (788 hits)
Two local TV reporters were shot dead in the midst of a live broadcast in Virginia on Wednesday, the victims of an attack perpetrated by a disgruntled former colleague.
The shooting occurred around 6.45am local time, in Moneta, near Roanoke, and appeared to have been carefully orchestrated to construct a horrific spectacle that would play out live on TV.
Reporter Alison Parker, 24, and cameraman Adam Ward, 27, were broadcasting a live interview with an official from the local chamber of commerce when there was the sudden sound of gunfire and screams. The camera tumbled to the ground, and producers at the local WDBJ7 news station cut off the broadcast, switching to a shocked-looking anchor in the studio.
It later emerged that both Parker and Ward died at the scene. The gunman also shot their interviewee, Vicki Gardner, the executive director of the Smith Mountain Lake regional chamber of commerce. Gardner survived and is in stable condition after surgery.
The suspect, Vester Lee Flanagan II, 41, was a former TV reporter at WDBJ7, who broadcast under the on-air name Bryce Williams. He died several hours after shooting himself.
By then Flanagan had posted on the internet his own video of the attack, apparently shot with a GoPro-style camera.
Flanagan, who is black, and claimed racially toned grievances against his former employer, also faxed a 23-page document to ABC News in which he made bizarre references to mass shootings.
He connected the atrocity in Roanoke to the recent shooting by a white supremacist at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina.
“Why did I do it? I put down a deposit for a gun on 6/19/15. The Church shooting in Charleston happened on 6/17/15 …,” Flanagan wrote in the document, according to ABC News. “What sent me over the top was the church shooting.”
At a press conference later on Wednesday, Franklin County sheriff Bill Overton said it was too early to conclude any specific motives behind the killings and said investigators were in possession of the document faxed to ABC as well as a cascade of social media postings published by the suspect
“It is obvious that this gentleman was disturbed in some way, the ways things had transpired at some point in his life,” he said. “It would appear that things were spiralling out of control.”
Overton told reporters that Flanagan fled the scene of the shooting in a gray Chevrolet Sonic, sparking a manhunt that culminated, four hours later, near Washington DC.
Around 11am, a Virginia state police patrol car equipped with a license plate reader identified Flanagan’s vehicle on the Interstate 66 in Fauquier County. After a brief pursuit, Flanagan shot himself. He died in hospital two hours later.
Flanagan had driven some 200 miles from the lakeside resort where he is suspected of killing his former colleagues, around four hours earlier live on TV. He apparently posted messages and video on Twitter and Facebook either immediately before or during his journey north.
“Vester was an unhappy man,” WDBJ7’s station manager, Jeff Marks, told viewers live on air a few hours later. “We employed him as a reporter, and he had some talent in that respect and some experience, although he’d been out of the business for a while.
“He quickly gathered a reputation as someone who was difficult to work with,” he added, saying that Flanagan would quickly “take offence”. “Eventually after many incidents of his anger coming to the fore, we dismissed him. And he did not take that well, we had to call the police to escort him from the building.”
Marks added that Flanagan filed an action against the TV station with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, in which he alleged staff at the company had made “racial comments”. A copy of the suit, filed in 2014 and obtained by the Guardian on Wednesday, shows he was disciplined by the Virginia station. Marks added the EEOC complaint was not upheld.
“This is the worst day of my career – worst day of all our careers,” Marks said in an interview with the Guardian outside the TV station on Wednesday evening. “We’ve lost beloved colleagues.”
On the youth of the victims, he said: “Why was I not targeted? Why was Kelly [Zuber, the news director] not targeted? We are the ones who actually put this guy out of a job.”
Flanagan, who had experience in local TV news across the country, had made similar allegations against another employer, in Florida, more than 15 years ago. Court filings showed he sued TWC, the NBC affiliate in Tallahassee, alleging racial discrimination in a case that was settled out of court in 2001.
Shocked and distraught and barely able to compute what had happened, WDBJ7’s news team continued to broadcast through the day, telling viewers they had news of a story “that has affected our WDBJ7 family very deeply”.
WDBJ7 interspersed updates from police about the hunt for Flanagan with emotional, hastily pulled-together tributes to their murdered colleagues. Occasionally, the anchors had to fight back tears, or just expressed their disbelief at what had happened.
..."“It is obvious that this gentleman was disturbed in some way, the ways things had transpired at some point in his life,” he said. “It would appear that things were spiralling out of control.”...
Definitely disturbed with some type of mental illness!
