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 coworkers who recall him as an off-kilter loner, 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 coworkers and then posted video of the attack to his Facebook page, Flanagan crashed a vehicle and shot himself. He died at a hospital later Wednesday, authorities said.
In the note, Flanagan—who had appeared on air using the name Bryce Williams—said he’d suffered discrimination both for being black and gay. He listed grievances dating to the 2007 mass shooting at Virginia Tech and the more recent massacre of worshippers at a historic black 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, said in an interview with a Hawaii station, Hawaii News Now (KHNL/KGMB).
This undated photo provided by WDBJ-TV, shows Vester Lee Flanagan II, who killed WDBJ reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward in Moneta, Va., Wednesday, Aug. 26, 2015. Flanagan was a former employee at WDBJ who appeared on air as Bryce Williams. (WDBJ-TV via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT
Flanagan, 41, had “a long series of complaints against coworkers nearly from the beginning of employment at the TV station,” said Dennison, now an official with the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources. “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; Flanagan was black.
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, the former news director of Florida’s WTWC-TV, said Wednesday. He spoke in an interview broadcast by Shafer’s current employer, San Diego 6 The CW.
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,” said Shafer, who did not immediately return a call from The Associated Press for comment.
Kimberly Moore 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.”
Wilmoth recalled an incident when workers meant to tease Flanagan for a story he did on a spelling bee that made it sound as if the winner would get a case of Girl Scouts, rather than Girl Scout cookies.
“The next day, somebody had a Girl Scout emblem on their desk and we made some copies of it and taped them to his computer,” she said. “If he had only laughed, we would have all been friends forever. But he didn’t laugh … he got mad.”
In 2000, Flanagan sued the Florida station over allegations of race discrimination, claiming that a producer called him a “monkey” in 1999 and that other black employees had been called the same by other workers. Flanagan also claimed that an unnamed white supervisor at the station said black people were lazy because they did not take advantage of scholarships to attend college. The parties later reached a settlement.
Flanagan grew up in Oakland, California, and graduated from San Francisco State University.
“I don’t remember anything bad about him,” said Sasha Dansky, a high school classmate, recalling Flanagan’s frequent appearance at parties. “He was just a nice, affable guy.”
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. “He was very, very loving.”
Barker said he had lost touch with Flanagan over the years but remained close to Flanagan’s sister, who still lives in the family’s home across the street. No one answered the door there Wednesday morning.
A former coworker at the California station, Barbara Rodgers, recalled him vaguely as “a young, eager kid out of journalism school,” who “just wanted to be on TV and to do a good job.”
Working in Georgia years ago, Flanagan was “tall, good looking and seemed to be really nice, personable and funny,” said a former fellow reporter, Angela Williams-Gebhardt, who now lives in Ohio. The station’s former news director, Michael Sullivan, said Flanagan was relatively inexperienced, but did a decent job without any apparent problems.
But at Roanoke’s WDBJ, Flanagan “got in lots of arguments with people,” said LaRell Reynolds, a former production worker at the station. “I don’t think anyone liked the guy.”