Evening Standard/London
The use of everyday phrases like “swinging by” and “going out in the field” was enough to get American TV reporter Alison Parker killed, it emerged yesterday.
Most of Parker’s colleagues at WDBJ TV in Roanoke, Virginia, didn’t give her innocuous remarks a second thought.
But co-worker Vester Lee Flanagan became obsessed that the young broadcast journalist meant the words as racist jibes and he even launched an official complaint against Parker when she was working at the station as an intern in 2013.
The internal memo branding Parker a racist was thrown out by TV executives and it was Flanagan who was eventually axed for his inappropriate behaviour.
But the imagined slight festered with Flanagan.
And hours after he gunned down Parker, 24, and cameraman Adam Ward during a live broadcast on Wednesday, Flanagan made it clear through his Twitter account that he still held a grudge.
“Alison made racist comments,” Flanagan tweeted as he was on the run from the police before turning his gun on himself. “They hired her after that?” he added.
His twisted post was referring to the run-in he had with Parker two-and-a-half years ago over her comments in the newsroom.
“One was something about ‘swinging’ by some place; the other was out in the ‘field,’” said a report on the dispute by assistant news director Greg Baldwin, who looked into the allegations in response to Flanagan’s unsuccessful discrimination lawsuit against the station.
Colleagues of Parker insisted on Thursday that she couldn’t have been less like a racist.
“That’s how that guy’s mind worked. Just crazy, left-field assumptions like that,” Ryan Fuqua, a video editor at WDBJ, told the New York Post.
“[Those words are] just common, everyday talk,” Fuqua explained. “He was unstable. One time, after one of our live shots failed, he threw all his stuff down and ran into the woods for like 20 minutes.”
Flanagan made the accusations a month before he was fired in February 2013.
Trevor Fair, a 33-year-old cameraman at WDBJ for six years, said the words Parker used are commonplace but that they would rile Flanagan.
“We would say stuff like, ‘The reporter’s out in the field’. And he would look at us and say, ‘What are you saying, cotton fields? That’s racist’,” said Fair. “We’d be like, ‘What?’ We all know what that means, but he took it as cotton fields, and therefore we’re all racists.”
Fair added that Flanagan was “management’s worst nightmare”.
Flanagan also flew off the handle when one of his bosses brought in watermelon for the staff.
“Of course, he thought that was racist. He was like, ‘You’re doing that because of me.’ No, the general manager brought in watermelon for the entire news team. He’s like, ‘Nope, this is out for me. You guys are calling me out because I’m black’.”