TV Shooter Showed ‘Bizarre Behavior’ Throughout Volatile Career

Long before he filmed himself gunning down a TV contributor and cameraman during a live news promote Wednesday, a male identified as a torpedo followed a disfigured and flighty career trail that saw him dismissed from during slightest dual stations for conflicts with co-workers, withdrawal colleagues with memories of an “off-kilter” loner simply hurt by bureau humor.

When a suspect, identified by authorities as Vester Lee Flanagan II, was dismissed from Roanoke, Virginia, hire WDBJ in 2013, he had to be escorted out of a building by internal military “because he was not going to leave frankly or underneath his possess giveaway will,” a station’s former news director, Dan Dennison, pronounced in an talk with a Hawaii station, Hawaii News Now (KHNL/KGMB).

Flanagan, 41, had “a prolonged array of complaints conflicting co-workers scarcely from a commencement of practice during a TV station,” pronounced Dennison, now an central with a Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources. “All of these allegations were deemed to be unfounded. And they were mostly … along secular lines, and we did a consummate review and could find no justification that anyone had racially discriminated conflicting this man.” The victims of Wednesday’s sharpened were white; Flanagan was black.

Hours after he allegedly shot his former co-workers Wednesday, Flanagan crashed a car and troopers found him pang from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He died during a sanatorium after Wednesday, authorities said.

The dispute described by Dennison in many ways echoed another, in 2000, when Flanagan was dismissed from a Tallahassee, Florida, radio hire in 2000 after melancholy associate employees, a former administrator said.

Flanagan “was a good on-air performer, a flattering good contributor and afterwards things started removing a small bizarre with him,” Don Shafer, a former news executive of Florida’s WTWC-TV pronounced Wednesday in an talk promote on Shafer’s stream employer, San Dieg o 6 The CW.

Shafer pronounced managers during a Florida hire dismissed Flanagan since of his “bizarre behavior.”

“He threatened to punch people out and he was kind of regulating sincerely roughshod over other people in a newsroom,” pronounced Shafer, who did not immediately lapse a call from AP for comment.

Kimberly Moore Wilmoth, who worked with Flanagan during a Florida station, private him as “off-kilter” and someone who “never unequivocally done himself partial of a team.”

Recalling one of a array of incidents, Wilmoth pronounced that co-workers meant to provoke Flanagan for a story he did on a spelling bee that done it sound as if a leader would get a box of Girl Scouts, rather than cookies sole by a group.

“The subsequent day, somebody had a Girl Scout button on their table and we done some copies of it and taped them to his computer,” she said. “If he had usually laughed we would have all been friends forever. But he didn’t giggle … he got mad. And that was when we satisfied h e wasn’t partial of a collegiality that exists in a newsroom and he private himself from it.”

In 2000, Flanagan sued a Florida hire over allegations of competition discrimination, claiming that a writer called him a “monkey” in 1999 and that other black employees had been called a same name by other workers. Flanagan also claimed that an unnamed white administrator during a hire pronounced black people were idle since they did not take advantage of scholarships to attend college. The parties after reached a settlement.

Flanagan grew adult in Oakland, California, and graduated from San Francisco State University.

Virgil Barker, who grew adult on a same tree-lined travel in a Oakland hills, private his childhood crony Wednesday with fondness.

“I know we wish to hear that he was a monster, though he was a finish opposite,” Barker said. “He was very, unequivocally loving.”

Barker pronounced he had mislaid hold with Flanagan over a years though remained tighten to Flanagan’ s sister, who still lives in a family’s home opposite a street.

No one answered a doorway Wednesday morning during a white mortar house, with fruit trees in a front yard unaware San Francisco Bay.

Before and after his work in Florida, Flanagan, who also seemed on-air regulating a name Bryce Williams, worked during a array of stations around a country, infrequently for usually a few months during a time.

They enclosed a army in 1996 during KPIX, a San Francisco station, where a mouthpiece reliable he worked as a freelance prolongation assistant. From 1997 to 1999, he worked as a ubiquitous assignment contributor during WTOC-TV in Savannah, Georgia. From 2002 to 2004, he worked as a contributor and anchor during WNCT-TV in Greenville, North Carolina, ubiquitous manager and clamp boss John Lewis said.

A former co-worker during a California station, Barbara Rodgers, private him usually vaguely as “a young, fervent child out of broadcasting school,” who “just wanted to be on TV and to do a go od job.”

Working in Georgia years ago, Flanagan was “tall, good looking and seemed to be unequivocally nice, friendly and funny,” pronounced a former associate reporter, Angela Williams-Gebhardt, who now lives in Ohio.

But in a wayward 23-page minute sent by fax Wednesday to ABC News shortly after a shooting, Flanagan listed grievances dating behind to a 2007 mass sharpened during Virginia Tech and a some-more new electrocute of worshippers during a ancestral black church in Charleston, S.C.

“I’ve been a tellurian powder keg for a while,” Flanagan wrote in a note, “just watchful to go BOOM!!!!”

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Associated Press reporters Gary Fineout in Tallahassee, Florida, Garance Burke in Oakland, California, Holbrook Mohr in Jackson, Mississippi, and Russ Bynum in Savannah, Georgia, contributed to this story.

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