On-air killer’s final, brutal sign-off
Print Edition
EVEN after gunning down a TV news reporter and cameraman during a live interview, Vester Lee Flanagan II continued to rage. But after a volatile career that had seen him fired at least twice for clashing with co-workers, this would be the former broadcaster’s last, brutal sign-off.
“I’ve been a human powder keg for a while ... just waiting to go BOOM!!!” Flanagan wrote in a rambling 23-page note faxed to ABC News soon after the shooting.
Hours after he shot his former co-workers and then posted a video of the attack on his Facebook page, Flanagan crashed a vehicle and shot himself. He died in hospital.
In the note, Flanagan — who had appeared on air using the name Bryce Williams — said he’d suffered discrimination for being both black and gay. He listed grievances dating to the 2007 mass shooting at Virginia Tech and the more recent massacre of worshippers at a church in Charleston, South Carolina.
When Flanagan was fired from Roanoke, Virginia, station WDBJ in 2013, he had to be escorted from the building by police “because he was not going to leave willingly or under his own free will,” the station’s former news director, Dan Dennison, told Hawaii News Now.
Flanagan, 41, had “a long series of complaints against co-workers nearly from the beginning of employment at the TV station,” said Dennison. “All of these allegations were deemed to be unfounded,” he said, adding that the station found “no evidence that anyone had racially discriminated against this man.”
The victims of Wednesday’s shooting — reporter Alison Parker, 24, and cameraman Adam Ward, 27 — were white.
The conflict described by Dennison echoed another, in 2000, when Flanagan was fired from a Tallahassee, Florida, television station after threatening fellow employees, a former supervisor said.
Flanagan “was a good on-air performer, a pretty good reporter and then things started getting a little strange with him,” Don Shafer, former news director of Florida’s WTWC-TV, said.
Shafer said Flanagan was fired because of his “bizarre behavior.”
“He threatened to punch people out and he was kind of running fairly roughshod over other people in the newsroom,” Shafer said.
Kimberly Wilmoth, who worked with Flanagan at the Florida station, recalled him as “off-kilter” and someone who “never really made himself part of the team.”
But Virgil Barker recalled his childhood friend with fondness. “I know you want to hear that he was a monster, but he was the complete opposite,” Barker said.
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