There were only a few frames of footage, but as the staff of WDBJ7 News replayed the clip over and over, huddled together round a video monitor, they realised that the man who had just gunned down two of their colleagues was someone they all knew.
“We kept playing it back to get a closer look,” said Brent Watts, 39, the station’s chief meteorologist. “He was one of the first names that came up.”
Bryce Williams, as he called himself, had worked at WDBJ7 for a turbulent 11 months. His real name was Vester Flanagan and he had always been an angry colleague. He would scream if someone disagreed with him. Cameramen were often the targets of his attacks. He appeared to see their role as merely to burnish his star presence on screen.
What wound him up the most, however, were comments he considered racist. Almost every day he claimed he was being attacked for being both black and gay. Often station bosses could barely comprehend how a particular word or phrase had been perceived as an insult.
Criminologists describe him as the perfect example of an “injustice collector” — someone who blames all their problems on the prejudices of other people.
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Alison Parker was a cheerful, hard-working intern at the time and went on to establish herself as a local household name for her early morning broadcasts.
She was branded a racist by Flanagan after referring to a reporter as being “in the field” while covering a story. Although it was standard newsroom terminology, Flanagan believed she was alluding to slave plantation cotton fields.
When she said she would “swing by” for lunch, Flanagan took offence again. It was for those supposedly racist comments that Parker — along with her cameraman Adam Ward — was riddled with bullets while interviewing businesswoman Vicki Gardner live on a breakfast show from a tourist spot last Wednesday. Gardner was shot in the back and lost a kidney and part of her colon.
Parker was 24 years old, Ward was 27 and both had been dating colleagues from the television station. Ward’s fiancée, Melissa Ott, was producing the show that morning. Parker’s boyfriend, Chris Hurst, an anchor for the station, somehow managed to do a series of interviews. “She told me I was the love of her life,” he said on CNN. “She is the love of mine.”
This was a murder for modern times, meticulously planned for maximum exposure on television, online and on social media.
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Flanagan, 41, paused before unloading 17 shots from his Glock handgun to make sure his victims would be properly framed by the camera he was wearing. The gun loomed large in his footage, as weapons do in violent video games. He then released the gruesome footage on Facebook and Twitter, where it was immediately uploaded by thousands of people.
The killings reignited debate about gun control in America and prompted questions about self-obsession in the digital age. Having starred in his own snuff movie, Flanagan used it to spread the warped message that as a gay black man he was the real victim.
“He wasn’t just bent on revenge; he was bent on doing it in a visible and videographic way,” said Jeffrey Lieberman, a professor of psychiatry at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York in an interview with USA Today.
“It’s applying social media to committing a homicide. This bears all the hallmarks of [US] culture — ready availability of guns and social media-facilitated ability to disseminate instantly.”
A 23-page fax sent by Flanagan to ABC News detailed a lifetime of grievances, explaining he had been a “human powder keg for a while . . . just waiting to go and boom”.
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The trigger, he said, had been the massacre of nine black worshippers in a church in Charleston, North Carolina, in June and the killer Dylann Roof’s declaration that he wanted to start a race war.
Two days later Flanagan put down a deposit on a gun. This was the weapon he ultimately turned on himself by a roadside as he struggled to outrun police who had tracked his phone.
Dan Dennison, former head of news at WDBJ7, had been instrumental in Flanagan’s dismissal. He had no time for notions of victimhood and racism as far as Flanagan was concerned. “It just seems to me that he was pure evil,” he said. “He was just an evil, evil individual.”
Flanagan grew up in Oakland, California. His father, Vester Sr, had been an American football star at college, played professionally for the Green Bay Packers and became dean of San Francisco State University. His mother, Betty, was a teacher. The family were Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Life at home was troubled. Vester Sr obtained a restraining order against his wife in the early 1980s, claiming she had threatened to shoot him in his sleep and kill their three children: Flanagan, 8, Valerie, 9, and Vicki, 10.
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At high school Flanagan played the trumpet and was nicknamed Robo for his running. He also did some modelling. After graduating from San Francisco State University he is said to have worked part-time as an escort.
He got his first break in television news in 1996, landing a job in Savannah, Georgia, with WTOC-TV. He found a boyfriend, Ken, according to his suicide notes and was happy for a while.
In 1998 he moved to Tallahassee, Florida, to join WTWC. But two years later he filed a legal complaint against the station, alleging that he had been the victim of racial slurs and bullying.
The station sacked him, citing poor performance, profanity and “misbehaviour with regards to co-workers”. The case was settled out of court.
Flanagan moved around other local television stations across the south before arriving at WDBJ7 in Roanoke in March 2012 on a salary of $36,000 a year. His employment file was soon marked with entries accusing him of “misinterpreting” the actions and words of his colleagues.
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He was admonished for “harsh language”, “aggressive body language” and “lash[ing] out at a photographer in front of members of the public”.
Formal warnings and counselling made little difference. He continued to complain about racial slurs. “All investigations determined that no reasonable person would have taken any of the cited instances as discrimination or harassment,” said Jeff Marks, the station manager.
The words and phrases that offended Flanagan are what sociologists call “microaggressions” — seemingly innocuous words that prompt an excessive reaction. America’s universities go to great lengths to provide “trigger warnings” when students have to study a text that may mention rape, domestic violence or racial discrimination that could upset them.
It was from this cosseted intellectual position that Flanagan found reasons to be upset. In plain-speaking Roanoke, such views held little sway. “He was just out to stir it,” a former colleague said.
On the day of his dismissal Flanagan warned the station bosses to “call the police, I’m going to make a stink”. As the ruckus unfolded, Adam Ward, the office joker, started filming. Flanagan shouted some abuse at Ward and threw a small wooden crucifix at his boss, Dennison, saying, “You’ll need this.”
For the next 2½ years Flanagan continued to live in a sparsely furnished apartment across the street from the television station along with his two cats.
He brought two unsuccessful legal challenges over his sacking and worked in call centres and as a receptionist to make ends meet.
The cats were killed before he drove to the Bridgewater Plaza shoppintg centre on the shores of Smith Mountain Lake in a car containing a wig and three fake numberplates for his getaway.
He watched his prey as the television filming got under way. Then he took aim, shooting Ward in the head from behind.
As Ward fell, his camera came to rest pointing at Flanagan and sending back to the studio the image his colleagues would later replay.
Finally, without a word, Flanagan calmly pursued the fleeing Parker, shooting again and again as she screamed.
The horror was reminiscent of any number of blood-spattered Hollywood films in which the central character takes revenge on his tormentors. But the torment was all in his imagination.
THE funerals of Parker and Ward are due to take place this week. In the meantime the communities of the Blue Ridge mountains have found their own ways to mourn.
As darkness fell on the football field at Martinsville High School on Thursday, Parker’s friends and family lit candles in tribute.
It was only six years ago that she had graduated from the school where she was a champion swimmer, the star trumpet player in the jazz band and an actress, singer and dancer in school productions.
Flanagan has achieved transient fame, but the extent to which his actions reflect deeper problems with a digital culture of extreme attention-seeking will be debated long after he has been forgotten.
“He viewed himself as a guy who should be here on network television news,” said John Miller, New York City’s deputy police commissioner. “Unfortunately, he found the most terrible way to get there and to be that lead story.”
Father to arm himself for a gun battle
The father of Alison Parker is on a mission to see new gun control laws in America. Yet in order to challenge the powerful gun lobby, Andy Parker, 62, a one-time Broadway actor, believes he will have to start bearing arms himself.
“We don’t have a gun in our family,” he said. “I’m probably going to have to get one. I mean, sad to say, but . . . unfortunately, that’s the world we live in.”
He added: “When you’re [appearing] in the media and when you are taking on an issue like this, there are a lot of people who take exception to what you are saying, so I will probably have to do that.”
Parker has already spoken to Virginia’s governor, Terry McAuliffe, about introducing new background checks at state level to make it harder for people to obtain guns. McAuliffe has tried and failed before to get such legislation passed.
Parker also wants to lead a new national campaign for tighter gun ownership laws, pressuring politicians to stand up to the National Rifle Association, the well-funded pro-gun lobby group.
“It’s time that we hold these people’s feet to the fire and shame them wherever we can,” said Parker.