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Former News Director: Roanoke Killer Would Get Into Physical Conflicts With Staff

Kerry Picket Political Reporter
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Vester Lee Flanagan, the former TV news reporter who fatally gunned down two former WDBJ colleagues and injured one other civilian Wednesday, was described as an employee who found himself in physical confrontations with other staffers at another TV news station he was employed at in Tallahassee, Florida, 15 years ago.

San Diego 6 News Director Don Shafer worked with Flanagan as a news director at WTWC in 2000 and told his current colleagues at San Diego 6, “I hired him. He came to work for us. He was a clever reporter. Kind of a funny guy. As time went on I made him my weekend evening anchorman. He was a pretty good guy.”

Shafer continued, “But then as time went on he started having conflicts with people in the studio and the directors other people at the station to the point where it became physical. My general manager and I — we just had to get him out of there, and so we terminated his contract.”

Tallahassee-based WCTV meteorologist Nancy Dignon also worked with Flanagan at NBC 40 in Tallahassee and recalled an incident that became extremely intense after she pointed out a mistake he made on the air.

“We are all in disbelief – and quite shaken by this,” Dignon told WCTV. “We knew he was volatile, but we never thought in our wildest dreams that he was capable of something like this.”

She said of the conflict she had with him that it “escalated so unexpectedly and so quickly… that he asked me to take it outside.”

Flanagan, known on the air at Roanoke Virgnia’s WDBJ as Bryce Williams, was also described as difficult to physically handle at times, Shafer said.

“He was becoming really paranoid and becoming really difficult to work with. And wanting to argue with everyone and fight with everyone, and it became physical after a while to the point where I had to escort him out of the building,” the news director said.

This situation was repeated 12 years later when Flanagan went to Roanoke and spent a year on staff at WDBJ as a reporter. By the time he was fired two years ago, he was escorted out of the building by law enforcement.

The Huffington Post reported that, according to internal emails included in legal filings, when Flanagan accused his WDBJ of racial discrimination, he was shown as the one who was making his colleagues feel uncomfortable and creating a hostile work environment.

“On three separate occasions in the past month and a half, you have behaved in a manner that has resulted in one or more of your co-workers feeling threatened or uncomfortable,” one staffer wrote in May 2012.

When Flanagan was given a severance letter, his WDBJ claims he said, “You better call police because I’m going to make a big stink.”

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Shafer also went through the wringer with Flanagan’s litigious nature. However, he says that Flanagan initially accused WTWC for discrimination against homosexuals.

“He was wanting to sue us for discrimination over his sexual orientation. When it was explained to him by his own attorney that, at the time, sexual orientation was not a class. That’s something that our lawyer in bluejeans could talk about, but he had no grounds, so he changed it to racial discrimination, and the judge threw it out in summary judgment before it went to court, as I recall,” Shafer explained.

Flanagan shot and killed WDBJ reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward during a live broadcast. Parker was in the midst of interviewing Vicki Gardner, executive director of the Smith Mountain Lake Regional Chamber of Commerce. Gardner was shot in the back during the incident and was rushed to the hospital. She is currently in stable condition.

Flanagan killed himself with his firearm after posting video of the fatal assault and tweeting about what he had done.

“I still never thought he was capable of doing something like that,” Shafer said when asked by his San Diego 6 anchors to reflect on how he reacted when he discovered Flanagan was the prime suspect to the double murder.