Vester Flanagan, a 41-year-old former reporter, shot his victims in a manner calculated to puncture the membrane between news and its consumers. The man who craved an audience, according to his colleagues, forced America to watch.
Live Virginia shooting: family and colleagues mourn WDBJ7 journalists
Tributes paid to two TV news journalists shot live on air by a disgruntled former colleague
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Parker and Ward were young journalists working for WDBJ7 in Roanoke, on the western edges of Virginia. They were 24 and 27 years old respectively, and both planned to marry other colleagues soon.
They had driven to the resort town of Smith Mountain Lake to interview Vicki Gardner, president of a local chamber of commerce for the early morning show.
It was the most routine of small-town assignments, covering the 50th anniversary of the creation of a reservoir. But Flanagan, who lived in an apartment complex across the street from the television studio, had somehow tracked his colleagues to the site of the interview.
“We’re seeing tourism here,” Gardner was saying at 6.45am. “We want people who come here to say, ‘That was ...”
In that instant a gunshot cracked off-camera, and then several more. Ward dropped his camera, and even though Parker ran away her screams never faded, as she ran with her microphone still live. The broadcast cut back to the studio, where a news anchor sat with her mouth hanging slack. With those shots Flanagan had his audience.
In nearby Moneta, Virginia, Gardner’s friend and local realtor Steve Drake watched the local television morning show. The moment is etched in his memory, he said: He was sitting with a cup of coffee in one hand, and the other hovering mid-pet over the family dog.
He reached for his television remote and rewound the program. “Debbie!” he called to his wife. “Come look at this. That’s Vicki. Those are gunshots.”
“Maybe it’s a car backfiring?” she said.
“No,” said Drake, an ex-military member. “Those are shell casings bouncing around.”
The broadcast was aired across hundreds of miles of rolling Virginia hills.
But later in the morning Flanagan amplified the signal: He posted video – his own first-person video – of the shooting, advertising it on Twitter.
Before Twitter’s administrators could take it down, he wrote, “I filmed the shooting see Facebook.”
His calculations had been thorough. He had used an action-ready, GoPro-style camera to do his filming. He had typed a 23-page manifesto, which he faxed to ABC News after the shooting. He had ditched his car, a Ford Mustang, at the local airport, and was driving a rented car toward northern Virginia.
Even as he ran from the scene of his crime he was updating his social media accounts. Where he had failed after years in traditional media, online he had become infamous in an instant.
Erin Arnold, Gardner’s daughter, received a call at her home in St Augustine, Florida, and hearing the news of her 62-year-old mother immediately boarded a plane for Virginia.
From Charlotte to Roanoke, she sat listening to two men describing the horror, each holding a phone. The men had both seen Flanagan’s video, and went on to describe it in detail. One held out his forefinger and thumb like a pistol, reenacting the event.
“I haven’t watched it,” Arnold told them. “That’s my mom. Vicki.” She was recovering after emergency surgery at a local hospital, she told them.
Her mother was lucky to have only lost a kidney and some intestines, they said. “It’s on YouTube.”
The men, along with thousands of other people, had become broadcasters. They had become participants in Flanagan’s worldwide program.
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Arnold held up her own phone like a small shield. “I don’t want to see it,” she said.
About 11.30am a state trooper caught up with Flanagan in northern Virginia on Interstate 66. Flanagan sped away, led police on a short chase, and then veered off the road into a ditch. He appeared to have shot himself, police said confirming his death.
Outside WDBJ7’s studio, people left flowers, balloons, and trinkets in a makeshift memorial for the victims.
Gil Harrington laid flowers on the memorial. “I knew all three” news people, she said. The victims and the shooter. Her daughter was murdered at a Metallica concert a few years ago, she said, and in the aftermath she became friendly with WDBJ7’s reporters.
“I really just want to support our journalistic community right now. I know they’re walking around with their skin turned inside out.”
Pamela Mack-Brown worked for 16 years before retiring as a production coordinator at the station. She is black. “There was no tension. No racial issues,” she said. “We were like family. That’s all.”
WDBJ7 reporters and cameramen wandered through the crowd in their parking lot, interviewing other journalists, being interviewed themselves. People they had never met before hugged the journalists, and took photos of them, which they then posted to their own social media accounts.
All of it – the instant renown – was what Vester Flanagan had yearned for his entire career, his former colleagues said. The manifesto he had sent to ABC News claimed his actions were in retaliation for racial discrimination, particularly triggered by the massacre of nine black churchgoers in Charleston.
“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,” he wrote. “What sent me over the top was the church shooting. And my hollow point bullets have the victims’ initials on them.”
When Flanagan shot through the barrier that separates news and consumers, it ruptured in both directions. The killings turned regular people into broadcasters, but it also made broadcasters into regular people.
“They were there every morning with me,” said Pamela Cook, a longtime WDBJ7 viewer. She wept openly in the studio parking lot.
“Maybe I didn’t know them super well, but they were like part of my family. They were like real people.”
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