“They showed up to work not expecting that they wouldn’t come home”, Walker, a 20-year veteran of the TV news business, said.
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More information continues to emerge about Vester Flanagan, 41, the man who murdered Alison Parker and Adam Ward during a newscast on August 26 before shooting and killing himself.
Flanagan worked at the station for pretty almost a year utilizing the on-air name Bryce Williams before he was sacked.
Still, he and others in the close-knit Tallahassee media market said they were shaken by the news. “We knew he was volatile, but we never thought in our wildest dreams that he was capable of something like this”.
She said that “he didn’t laugh at our jokes or at himself when he would make a mistake”. “And he did not take that well, we had to call the police to escort him from the building”, he told the Guardian.
Prospective employers are conducting more thorough background checks, but because of certain laws, former employers are forced to remain vague about an employee who was let go.
“But the surgeon told me that a couple of centimetres and she wouldn’t be walking, and a couple of centimetres more and she wouldn’t be alive”, he said.
A local television anchor-reporter, slated to lose his job with Tallahassee’s NBC affiliate in two weeks, has filed a racial discrimination suit against the station — alleging that news producers and other managers made offensive remarks about blacks and fired him for complaining about it.
In a document dated just two months after he started, a timeline indicates Flanagan was written up three separate times for interactions with photographers.
Despite settling out of court, WTWC adamantly denies the Williams’ accusations and says race had nothing to do with his termination.
Shafer also went through the ringer with Flanagan’s litigious nature.
In 2000 he filed a racial discrimination suit against the station, WTWC.
Williams sued the company following his dismissal, but his claims were thrown out.
Flanigan allegedly shot and killed at close range reporter Alison Parker, 24, and cameraman Adam Ward, 27, in the middle of a live interview early Wednesday.
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Vicki Gardner, the executive director of the Smith Mountain Lake Regional Chamber of Commerce, who Parker was interviewing at the time of the incident, was shot in the back and is undergoing surgery, CNN reports. She is now in stable condition. He then posted a video to his Facebook and Twitter pages of himself shooting both at point-blank range.
