Vester Lee Flanagan, who was known on-air as Bryce Williams is shown in this handout photo from TV station WDBJ7 obtained by Reuters August 26, 2015. Flanagan is a suspect in the shooting death of Alison Parker, a WDBJ reporter, and Adam Ward, a WDBJ photographer were shot and killed in Virginia on Wednesday morning while conducting a live interview.HANDOUT/Reuters
Long before he filmed himself shooting and killing a TV reporter and cameraman during a live news broadcast Wednesday, the man identified as the suspect followed a twisted and volatile career path that saw him fired from at least two stations for conflicts with co-workers, leaving colleagues with memories of an "off-kilter" loner easily angered by office humour.
When the suspect, identified by authorities as Vester Lee Flanagan II, was fired from WDBJ in Virginia in 2013, he had to be escorted out of the building by local 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).
Flanagan, 41, had "a long series of complaints against co-workers 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. And they were largely under along racial lines, and we did a thorough investigation and could find no evidence that anyone had racially discriminated against this man." The victims of Wednesday's shooting were white; Flanagan was black.
Hours after he allegedly shot his former co-workers Wednesday, Flanagan crashed a vehicle and troopers found him suffering from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He died at a hospital later Wednesday, authorities said.
The conflict described by Dennison in many ways echoed another, in 2000, when Flanagan was fired from a north Florida television station in 2000 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 in an interview broadcast on Shafer's current employer, San Diego 6 The CW.
Shafer said managers at the Florida station fired Flanagan because of his "bizarre behaviour."
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 name 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.
Before and after his work in Florida, Flanagan, who also appeared on-air using the name Bryce Williams, worked at a series of stations around the country, sometimes for just a few months at a time.
A rambling letter to family, friends and authorities that was sent to ABC News, Flanagan listed a long list of grievances, dating back to the 2007 mass shooting at Virginia Tech and the more recent massacre of worshippers at a historic black church in Charleston, S.C.
"I've been a human powder keg for a while," Flanagan wrote in the note, "just waiting to go BOOM!!!!"