The man accused of shooting and killing a reporter and photographer on live TV in Virginia has worked alongside the current news director of a San Diego station.
Vester Flanagan II fatally shot 24-year old reporter Allison Parker and 27-year old photographer, Adam Ward while they were in the middle of an interview Wednesday morning. The woman they were interviewing was also seriously wounded.
Flanagan grew up in Northern California, attending Skyline High School in Oakland before graduating with a degree in radio and film from San Francisco State University in 1995. He went by the name Bryce Williams on air and worked for a handful of TV stations across the country during his bumpy career.
Don Shafer, news director for CW San Diego 6, also worked with Flanagan. He was his boss about 15 years ago at an NBC station in Tallahassee, Florida.
Shafer said Flanagan showed promise at first and had a good on-air personality, but it didn't last.
“He kind of evolved into a difficult guy to work with, to the point he had such conflict going on with the studio crew, for instance, that it almost became a physical thing and the general manager and I, we terminated him from his contract,” Shafer said.
Still, when he heard news of the shooting Wednesday morning, he could hardly believe it.
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"I was horrified," he said. "I almost drove off the road because I knew him and I knew him to be a little strange when he worked for me back then. That's why we got rid of him."
Flanagan was fired from the CBS affiliate in Roanoke, Virginia, more than two years ago, and the station's general manager called him an "unhappy man" who developed a reputation of being difficult to work with, leading to his termination.
The suspect expressed his apparent grudge toward former co-workers, including the two killed, on social media.
He also posted video of the attack. His posts were shared more than a thousand times before Facebook and Twitter suspended his accounts.
Dr. Bey-Ling Sha with San Diego State's School of Journalism and Media Studies told NBC 7 in the wake of this crime, we must ask ourselves where we as a society sit in our personal use of social media.
"We have a choice to perpetuate the evil by retweeting footage of the crime or choose not to give it a voice," Sha said.
Social media act as an amplification mechanism, she said, so one little post can cause a large ripple.
