ROANOKE, Va. — Race played a role in Wednesday’s murders of a televisions news crew by a former co-worker.
Vester Lee Flanagan, who went by the name Bryce Wallace, sent 23 pages of reasons he says he committed the murders to ABC News.
He admitted to being “somewhat racist against whites, blacks and Latinos.”
He said he was spurred by the murder in a historic black church in Charlotte, “What sent me over the top was the church shooting. And my hollow point bullets have the victims’ initials on them.”
He went on to say he felt marginalized as a gay black man and was mad the photographer he shot and killed had once reported him to Human Resources.
A former co-worker said on CNN the shooter was always angry, blamed others for his mistakes and was told to seek mental help when he was fired from WDBJ-TV two years ago.
Flanagan was a reporter and resented being fired.
He didn’t go nicely back then, and cameraman Adam Ward rolled on his emotional outburst which led to the newsroom being cleared and sales staff locking themselves in a room.
Flanagan scoffed at Ward and flipped off the camera.
Before police walked him out of the building, the reporter who went by Bryce Williams also handed his manager a small wooden cross, and said, “You’ll need this.”
Flanagan had not worked with Alison Parker, the reporter he shot dead, but there were signs he resented her having been hired.
He planned meticulously to act out a lot of resentment violently and get back into the limelight again, before turning his gun on himself.
Flanagan, aka Williams, recorded video of his killing, which he spread on social media as he fled authorities.
He appeared to have prepped his Twitter account days before the killing with a review of images from stations of his life.
During his flight, posts to Twitter appeared in the name of Bryce Williams, showing video recorded from the perspective of his gun barrel as his shots struck his victims.
Many social media users were horrified by the scenes playing out before them on auto-play.
Both Facebook and Twitter quickly shut down the accounts.
While on the run, he sent a 23-page fax to ABC News under his reporter pseudonym with a few details about his career, long rantings about his disappointments and a litany of people and circumstances he blamed. Parts were labeled as suicide notes.
In a ranting note in his farewell fax, Flanagan tried to justify his killings.
“OK, so the big question is ‘Why’?” he wrote. “Well, after I compiled well over 100 pages chronicling the hurt in my life, I asked myself, ‘Why NOT?'”
And he talked about having a disturbed mind. “I’ve been a human powder keg for a while….just waiting to go BOOM!!!! at any moment,” he wrote.
He spent some time making allegations of racism, including against reporter Parker, whom he said “made racist comments” but got hired anyhow. There was no elaboration, and CNN was unable verify the claim.
But Flanagan also blamed much of his misery on black men and white women and said he was “somewhat racist against whites, blacks and Latinos.”
He admired the shooters who massacred students at Columbine High School and Virginia Tech, which lies about 20 miles away from Roanoke.
Flanagan said he put a deposit down for a gun two days after the Charleston, South Carolina, church shooting in June and ranted against the accused shooter.
“As for Dylann Roof? You (deleted)! You want a race war (deleted)? BRING IT THEN YOU WHITE (deleted)!!!” the fax said.
Police recovered two guns from Flanagan, Glock 9mm pistols he purchased legally.
Alison Parker and Adam Ward are the first journalists killed in the United States in the line of duty since 2007, according to CNN Senior Media Correspondent Brian Stelter.
“I find my grief unbearable,” Parker’s father Andy Parker said in a statement released on behalf of the family. “Allison was our bright, shining light, and it was cruelly extinguished by yet another crazy person with a gun.”
Ward was engaged to be married to WDBJ producer Melissa Ott, a colleague said. Ward recently told her that he planned to get out of news and do something else.
