Virginia Gunman Was Urged to Seek Medical Help, According to Internal Memos

The Virginia gunman Vester Flanagan, who killed two co-workers as they filmed a live broadcast was told by his bosses to seek medical help, according to internal memos seen by the Guardian.

The memos detail a series of disputes between Flanagan and his colleagues, dating from two months after Flanagan started working at the CBS affiliate station WDBJ7 in Roanoke, Virginia. The memos were written by Dan Dennison, the station director at the time.

Flanagan died in hospital on Wednesday from self-inflicted gunshot wounds after shooting reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward as they filmed a piece on local tourism. The interviewee, Vicky Gardner, of the Smith Mountain Lake Regional Chamber of Commerce, was also shot but is being treated in hospital.

Flanagan, 41, was first reprimanded in May 31, 2012, according to the memos, for making his colleagues feel “threatened and extremely uncomfortable” after he lost his temper on two occasions. During that instance, Flanagan insisted that a cameraman record an interview in a certain way, which, according to the memo, made both the photographer and interviewee uncomfortable.

By 30 July 2012, Flanagan, was told by Dennison to contact employee assistance professionals at the company Health Advocate, due to continued displays of anger towards co-workers. He was told in one memo, ” Under no circumstances should you engage in harsh language, demonstrate aggressive body language, or lash out at a photographer in front of members of the public. You must make improvements immediately or you will face termination of employment.”

He was eventually fired in February 2013 due to “unsatisfactory job performance and inability to work as a team member,” according to his termination notice. His last day is detailed in a series of memos where Flanagan reportedly became angry and called it “bullshit.”

Flanagan had “a long series of complaints against co-workers nearly from the beginning of employment at the TV station,” said Dennison, in an interview with a Hawaii station, Hawaii News Now (KHNL/KGMB). “All of these allegations were deemed to be unfounded.” Though the claims were along racial lines, he said, “we did a thorough investigation and could find no evidence that anyone had racially discriminated against this man.” The victims of Wednesday’s shooting — Parker, 24, and Ward, 27 — were white; Flanagan was black.

Hours after he shot his former co-workers then posted video of the attack to his Facebook page, Flanagan crashed a vehicle and shot himself. He died at a hospital later Wednesday, authorities said.

The conflict described by Dennison, who is now an official with the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources, in many ways echoed another, in 2000, when Flanagan was fired from a Tallahassee, Florida, television station after threatening fellow employees, a former supervisor said.

Flanagan “was a good on-air performer, a pretty good reporter and then things started getting a little strange with him,” Don Shafer, the former news director of Florida’s WTWC-TV said Wednesday in an interview broadcast on Shafer’s current employer, San Diego 6 The CW.

Shafer said managers at the Florida station fired Flanagan because of his “bizarre behavior.”

“He threatened to punch people out and he was kind of running fairly roughshod over other people in the newsroom,” said Shafer, who did not immediately return a call from AP for comment.

Kimberly Moore Wilmoth, who worked with Flanagan at the Florida station, recalled him as “off-kilter” and someone who “never really made himself part of the team.”

Recalling one of a number of incidents, Wilmoth said that co-workers meant to tease Flanagan for a story he did on a spelling bee that made it sound as if the winner would get a case of Girl Scouts, rather than cookies sold by the group.

“The next day, somebody had a Girl Scout emblem on their desk and we made some copies of it and taped them to his computer,” she said. “If he had only laughed we would have all been friends forever. But he didn’t laugh … he got mad. And that was when I realized he wasn’t part of the collegiality that exists in a newsroom and he removed himself from it.”

In 2000, Flanagan sued the Florida station over allegations of race discrimination, claiming that a producer called him a “monkey” in 1999 and that other black employees had been called the same name by other workers. Flanagan also claimed that an unnamed white supervisor at the station said black people were lazy because they did not take advantage of scholarships to attend college. The parties later reached a settlement.

Flanagan grew up in Oakland, California, where he was a homecoming prince one year at Skyline High School. Virgil Barker, who grew up on the same tree-lined street, recalled his childhood friend Wednesday with fondness.

“I know you want to hear that he was a monster, but he was the complete opposite,” Barker said. “He was very, very loving.”

Barker said he had lost touch with Flanagan over the years but remained close to Flanagan’s sister, who still lives in the family’s home across the street.

No one answered the door Wednesday morning at the white stucco house, with fruit trees in the front yard overlooking San Francisco Bay.

Flanagan graduated from San Francisco State University. A former classmate, Pamela Rousseau of Danville, Calif., said Flanagan was a bit “flamboyant” and eager to be the front man when presenting students’ findings.

Before and after his work in Florida, Flanagan, who also appeared on-air using the name Bryce Williams, worked at a series of stations around the country.

They included a stint in 1996 at KPIX, a San Francisco station, where a spokeswoman confirmed he worked as a freelance production assistant. From 1997 to 1999, he worked as a general assignment reporter at WTOC-TV in Savannah, Georgia. From 2002 to 2004, he worked as a reporter and anchor at WNCT-TV in Greenville, North Carolina, general manager and vice president John Lewis said.

A former co-worker at the California station, Barbara Rodgers, recalled him only vaguely as “a young, eager kid out of journalism school,” who “just wanted to be on TV and to do a good job.”

Working in Georgia years ago, Flanagan was “tall, good looking and seemed to be really nice, personable and funny,” said a former fellow reporter, Angela Williams-Gebhardt, who now lives in Ohio. The station’s former news director, Michael Sullivan, said Flanagan was relatively inexperienced, but did a decent job, without any apparent problems.

But at Roanoke’s WDBJ, Flanagan “got in lots of arguments with people,” said LaRell Reynolds, a former production worker at the station. “I don’t think anyone liked the guy.”

After managers fired Flanagan, he worked as a call center representative for UnitedHealthcare in Roanoke from late 2013 to November 2014, the company said.

But in the days before the shootings, Flanagan assembled photos of himself on Twitter and Facebook, as if preparing to introduce himself to a wider audience. The postings continued after the shooting, when he tweeted that Parker had “made racist comments” and Ward had complained to human resources about him. Then, Flanagan posted video of the shooting online, showing him repeatedly firing at a screaming Parker as she tried to flee.

In a rambling 23-page letter sent by fax Wednesday to ABC News soon after the shooting, Flanagan said he’d been discriminated against both for being black and gay. He listed grievances dating back to the 2007 mass shooting at Virginia Tech and the more recent massacre of worshippers at a historic black church in Charleston, S.C.

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

Read next: What We Know About Virginia Shooting Victims Alison Parker and Adam Ward

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