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Virginia TV shooter Vester Lee Flanagan was a 'disturbed' and 'unhappy man'
Vester Lee Flanagan was a popular teenager, a model for Macy’s department store as a young man, and appeared to be a successful reporter at local television news stations in California and across the American south.
But away from the studio lights, his journalism career was troubled, marked by office disputes and legal complaints he filed that alleged racism at newsrooms in Tallahassee, Florida, in 2000 and in Virginia last year.
Officials said on Wednesday that ABC News had received a document, which ABC reported was a 23-page fax from someone purporting to be Bryce Williams, Flanagan’s onscreen pseudonym, about two hours after the attack.
The document claimed the attack was intended as revenge for the massacre of nine African Americans in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in June.
“What sent me over the top was the church shooting,” he reportedly wrote, adding that he had paid a deposit for a gun two days after the church shootings.
As their once shared workplace grieves for Parker and Ward, a preliminary portrait has emerged of an easily agitated employee who accused co-workers in at least two newsrooms of making racist comments. Flanagan’s most recent complaints, filed against reporters at WDBJ, were dismissed by the station manager on Wednesday as “fabricated”.