The man suspected of shooting and killing two television journalists in Roanoke, Va. Wednesday morning shot himself about five hours later during a police chase and was later pronounced dead at a hospital. 
 
 Authorities said the suspected gunman, Vester L. Flanagan, worked at WDBJ under the on-air name of Bryce Williams and was described by several people as a disgruntled employee at the station. 
 
 Dan Dennison, senior communications director for the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources, was the news director of the station from 2011 to 2013 and also hired and fired Flanagan during his tenure. In a live interview on Hawaii News Now Sunrise, he said Flanagan, who was hired in 2012, was terminated in 2013, largely for performance issues. 
 
 “He had a level of a long series of complaints against coworkers nearly from the beginning of employment at the TV station,” Dennison said. “That really had nothing to do with his termination, and after a lot of investigation both internally and externally, all of these allegations were deemed to be unfounded. And they were largely under along racial lines, and we did a thorough investigation and could find no evidence that anyone had racially discriminated against this man.” 
 
 Although Dennison said he couldn’t share complete details about the incident, he added that Flanagan’s termination was one of the toughest he’s ever been involved in, so much so that police had to escort Flanagan out of the building because he wouldn’t leave on his own free will. 
 
 The two victims -- reporter Alison Parker, 24, and photographer Adam Ward, 27 – died after being shot at around 6:45 a.m. ET while conducting a live interview near Roanoke. 
 
 "They were both really just great young people and it’s such a tragic circumstance," Dennison said. "You just never know, when you’re going to work, how a potentially unhinged or unsettled person might impact your life in such a tragic way as we saw in Roanoke this morning." 
 
 Copyright 2015 Hawaii News Now. All rights reserved. ||||| The Guardian has obtained internal memos from 2012 sent to gunman that outline ‘aggressive’ behaviour making colleagues feel ‘threatened’ 
 
 Vester Flanagan, the gunman who killed two journalists in Virginia, was told by his bosses to seek medical help after colleagues at the television station where he worked with his victims repeatedly complained about him, according to memos obtained by the Guardian. 
 
 Several flare-ups were detailed in internal messages from Dan Dennison, then the news director of WDBJ7, that were sent to Flanagan and copied to senior colleagues. Flanagan on Wednesday morning shot dead reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward. 
 
 Flanagan, who died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound later on Wednesday, was reprimanded for “lashing out” at a colleague and for his “harsh language” and “aggressive body language” while working as a reporter. 
 
 He was told to contact employee assistance professionals at the company Health Advocate. “This is a mandatory referral requiring your compliance,” Dennison told Flanagan on 30 July 2012. “Failure to comply will result in termination of employment.” 
 
 On Christmas Eve that year, Dennison emailed colleagues to say he had just warned Flanagan that he had one final chance to save his job. “I’m not entirely sure where his head is at,” said Dennison. Flanagan was fired three months later. 
 
 
 
 As he sued the station over his dismissal, Flanagan blamed everyone but himself. “My entire life was disrupted after moving clear across the country for a job only to have my dream turn into a nightmare,” he said, in a letter to a judge. 
 
 Flanagan’s rapid downfall at WDBJ7 is detailed in a series of candid memos obtained by the Guardian. Dennison, his boss, began sending internal messages about Flanagan’s behavior in May 2012, just two months after Flanagan began working at the station in southern Virginia. He appeared on screen under the name Bryce Williams. 
 
 “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,” Dennison told Flanagan. 
 
 The memo, addressed to Bryce Williams, said he had “used verbal and body language that left co-workers feeling both threatened and extremely uncomfortable” during a heated argument inside a live station truck. 
 
 The other instances involved Flanagan pressuring his accompanying photographer to record an interview in a certain way, forcefully repeating his demands in a way that made both the photographer and the interviewee uncomfortable. 
 
 “I’m not trying to be an asshole but the shaky video isn’t going to work,” he purportedly told the photographer before demanding that they redo the interview. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest WDBJ7 looks back at the careers of Alison Parker, 24, and Adam Ward, 27. Link to video 
 
 In the second memo, sent 30 July 2012, Dennison told him: “You have been the common denominator in these and other incidents outlined previously … It seems that you are taking the actions of many of the photographers quite personally and misinterpreting their actions or works.” 
 
 In a July performance review, a boss rated his ability to work with his co-workers as “unacceptable”. “The area where Bryce must make immediate improvement is with photographers. The issue is well-documented and has been discussed.” 
 
 In November, however, Flanagan was reprimanded once again – this time for wearing a sticker of President Obama while standing in line to vote in that year’s general election. Dennison told him he had clearly breached not just company regulations but also “standard journalistic ethics”. The news director wrote that they were “fast reaching the point” where Flanagan’s violations of policy “could mean termination”. 
 
 By December, Flanagan had a meeting with his bosses in which he said “maybe it’s time for me to go”. Dennison said that was his decision but they were willing to give him one more try, according to the email. 
 
 Virginia TV shooter Vester Lee Flanagan was a 'disturbed' and 'unhappy man' Read more 
 
 Yet Flanagan was fired in February 2013 due to “unsatisfactory job performance and inability to work as a team member”, according to his notice of termination. 
 
 His last day at work was recorded in exhaustive detail in another series of memos. Flanagan met with Dennison and another boss in his office. There Flanagan was informed he would be terminated. When he was presented with the severance package, Flanagan reportedly became angry and called it “bullshit”. 
 
 A second memo detailing his termination records Flanagan as yelling: “I’m not leaving, you’re going to have to call the f###ing police [sic],” Flanagan reportedly said, according to the memo. “Call the police. I’m not leaving. I’m going to make a stink and it’s going to be in the headlines.” 
 
 Flanagan then stormed out of the room and slammed the door, at which point Dennison decided to call the police. 
 
 
 
 When police arrived to escort him out of the building, Flanagan refused. The officers approached Flanagan and tried to remove the desk phone from his hand, repeatedly asking him to leave. 
 
 
 
 Flanagan then threw a hat and a small wooden cross at Dennison, reportedly saying: “You need this.” 
 
 
 
 As police escorted him out of the newsroom, he told an officer, according to the memo: “ You know what they did? They had a watermelon back there for a week and basically called me a n----- [sic].” 
 
 The memos were filed to a court in Roanoke, Virginia, as part of a civil lawsuit filed by Flanagan against the station in March 2014. He alleged racial and sexual discrimination, which the station denied. The case was dismissed later that year. 
 
 In May, Flanagan had sent a letter to Roanoke city general district court judge Francis Burkhart in which he claimed to be the victim of a “carefully orchestrated” attempt by the photography staff to have him “ousted” from the station. 
 
 He said he was upset that a staff photographer had reported him to the office’s human resources department after working with him only once. On Twitter earlier this month, Flanagan named Ward as the photographer whom he believed had reported him to HR. 
 
 Flanagan also claimed “racial harassment”, citing an incident in which he believed members of the newsroom deliberately placed a watermelon in his view. He said employees would make the fruit appear in different places around the newsroom. 
 
 “This was not an innocent incident,” Flanagan wrote. “The watermelon was placed in a strategic location where it would be visible to newsroom employees. 
 
 “What I encountered while employed at WDBJ-7 was nothing short of vile disgusting and inexcusable,” Flanagan wrote in the filing to Burkhart, which requested a trial by jury that he said should be entirely composed of African American women. 
 
 “Your Honor, I am not the monster here,” he said. “I get along with my current co-workers … [T]hat sure doesn’t sound like the monster I was painted to be.” ||||| HOTHEAD HISTORY 
 
 The cold-blooded Roanoke killer kept getting fired, kept threatening co-workers, and kept claiming he was the real victim. 
 
 Vester Lee Flanagan claimed in a suicide note Wednesday that June’s massacre of black parishioners at a South Carolina church was “the tipping point” that sent him on the path to murdering two journalists on live television Wednesday. 
 
 But in court papers and interviews with The Daily Beast, former colleagues describe Flanagan as a problematic employee, who was repeatedly reprimanded for his harsh treatment of coworkers, and complained that racism was behind harsh evaluations of his work. 
 
 “He just had a history of playing the race card,” former WTWC anchor Dave Leval told The Daily Beast. “I know he did that in Tallahassee a couple of times…” 
 
 The day Flanagan was fired from a Virginia TV station in 2013, his bosses called 911 because of his volatile behavior—an incident captured on camera by Adam Ward, a man who would later become one of his victims. 
 
 At a February 2013 meeting, managers at WDBJ7 in Roanoke told Flanagan he wasn’t a good fit and would be terminated. Flanagan became “agitated” before issuing a threat, one boss recalled in court papers. 
 
 “I’m not leaving,” fumed Flanagan, who went by “Bryce Williams” on air. “You’re going to have to call the fucking police. Call the police, I’m not leaving. I’m going to make a stink and it’s going to be in the headlines.” 
 
 One former manager, Dan Dennison, said Flanagan terrified employees so much they took shelter in a locked office. 
 
 “He repeated… his feeling that firing him would lead to negative consequences for me personally and for the station,” Dennison said, according to a statement in a racial discrimination lawsuit Flanagan filed in 2014, which was dismissed. 
 
 The disgruntled newsman handed Dennison a small wooden cross and warned him, “You’ll need this.” 
 
 But no one could guess that two years after he was fired, Flanagan would shoot two other journalists at his former TV station. 
 
 Shortly after 7 a.m., Flanagan approached Ward and reporter Alison Parker from behind at a local park while they were interviewing Vicki Gardner of the local chamber of commerce. Dressed in black, Flanagan drew a camera phone and a gun, and started shooting. 
 
 Ward was hit first, but managed to raise his camera for a final look at Flanagan before dying. Parker tried to run but was shot dead. Gardner was shot but survived and is now in stable condition. 
 
 via Facebook 
 
 Flanagan fled in a rental car and sparked an hours-long manhunt, during which he tweeted perceived slights from the victims. 
 
 Then Flanagan made the final, and surely most-watched broadcast of his career, sending out snuff films online. 
 
 Minutes later, authorities caught up with him. Flanagan apparently shot himself and crashed his car. He was transported to a hospital, where he later died. 
 
 WDBJ’s station manager Jeff Marks painted a picture of Flanagan’s erratic behavior at a news conference Wednesday. 
 
 “Vester was an unhappy man,” Marks said, adding, “when he was hired here, he quickly gathered a reputation as someone who was difficult to work with. He was sort of looking out for people to say things that he could take offense to.” 
 
 Flanagan also filed an employment discrimination suit against a Tallahassee, Florida, station where he worked from 1999 to 2000. (That case was settled out of court.) 
 
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 According to one news report, Flanagan said he and another black employee were called “monkeys” and claimed a supervisor once said, “Blacks are lazy and do not take advantage of free money” for scholarships and other opportunities. 
 
 Don Shafer, Flanagan’s former boss at WTWC in Tallahassee, called Flanagan a “pretty good reporter” but said “things started getting a little strange with him.” 
 
 “We ended up having to terminate his contract and let him go for bizarre behavior and fighting with other employees,” Shafer said on San Diego 6, where he now serves as news director. 
 
 “He threatened to punch people out, and he was kind of running fairly roughshod over other people in the newsroom,” Shafer added. 
 
 Former colleagues told The Daily Beast that Flanagan blew up at two female coworkers in Florida—and that one woman’s husband considered coming to work to defend her. 
 
 “In one case, the husband of one of the women came this close to coming into the station and pounding the hell out of him,” Leval said. 
 
 “When he left WTWC in Tallahassee, I don’t think anybody shed a tear,” Leval added. 
 
 Leval said photographers repeatedly tried to get out of assignments with Flanagan, who was difficult and acted like a “diva.” 
 
 Former news producer Greg Sextro said Flanagan was “the biggest dork I’d ever met in my entire life, but he was a really nice guy. A horrible reporter, but really nice.” 
 
 Sextro, who was called to a deposition in the Florida discrimination suit, said the budding journalist was treated well at the station and that colleagues tried to help him with his writing. 
 
 “The fact that he kept his job was because he was an African-American gay man. That’s pretty hard to say no to,” Sextro told The Daily Beast. 
 
 “He was just a goofy guy,” Sexro added. “I cannot see him doing this ever. He had to have been pushed to the limit to do something like that.” 
 
 Meanwhile ABC News reported Wednesday it received a suicide note via fax from “Bryce Williams” about two hours after the shooting. Flanagan claimed he purchased his gun two days after nine black parishioners were killed in Charleston in June—and that he was fighting back in the race war Dylann Roof supposedly wanted to start. 
 
 “The church shooting was the tipping point… but my anger has been building steadily,” Flanagan wrote. “I’ve been a human powder keg for a while… just waiting to go BOOM!!!!” 
 
 Flanagan also claimed he was attacked for being a gay black man, and that he suffered bullying, sexual harassment, and racial discrimination at work, ABC News reported. 
 
 Court papers in Flanagan’s 2013 discrimination case also reveal an apparent preoccupation with perceived racism against him. 
 
 “I am hereby requesting a trial which will be heard by a jury of my peers,” he wrote in a letter to the judge. “I would like my jury to be comprised of African-American women.” 
 
 Flanagan also mentioned a frequently appearing watermelon as evidence of racial harassment at the Roanoke TV station and claimed he had photos of it. 
 
 “This was not an innocent incident,” Flanagan claimed. “It appeared after a meeting during which ‘watermelon’ comments were discussed.” 
 
 He also claimed head photographer Lynn Eller was the mastermind of a “carefully orchestrated effort by the photography staff to oust me,” court documents show. 
 
 “Why did one of the photographers go to HR on me after working with me ONLY ONCE,” Flanagan wrote, in an apparent reference to victim Adam Ward. “There was nothing to report! That, Your honor, is just plain wrong.” 
 
 In further documents, he alleges that two station employees behaved in an inappropriate and threatening manner to him—with one of them “holding a sharp object (a pen) which could have been used as a weapon.” 
 
 Personnel records from May 2012 and filed in the case show Flanagan made colleagues feel “threatened or uncomfortable.” 
 
 He allegedly told one cameraman shooting b-roll from his shoulder, “I’m not trying to be an asshole, but the shaky video isn’t going to work.” Flanagan then allegedly turned to an interview subject and said, “I’m sorry, sir, the footage he just shot is completely unusable.” 
 
 A July 2012 document warned that Flanagan “must make improvements immediately” or “face termination of employment.” 
 
 In a performance review one month later, Flanagan scored a 1 out of 5 in the category of “works well together with photographer, producer and assignment editor;” he scored 3s on evaluations about delivering news “in an understandable manner” and “covering beat and enterprising stories.” 
 
 Bosses reprimanded Flanagan that November for wearing an Obama sticker when he voted, a violation of the nonpartisan conditions of his contract. 
 
 “While this is the first incident of this nature, and we trust the last, you need to quickly and diligently move from the category of an employee who commits misstep after misstep to the kind of problem-free employee we hope you can become,” Dennison wrote in a letter to Flanagan. 
 
 One of the final memos before his termination included a harsh suggestion: 
 
 “Avoid being merely a human tape recorder” and report the real news. 
 
 Among the missteps that led to this admonition was his decision to cover a local creamery over the governor’s comments on gun control after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. 
 
 Despite some coworkers’ warnings about Flanagan, friends struggled to understand what could make him crack. 
 
 Larrell Dean, a friend from college, told The Daily Beast the alleged killer “was a good soul and a bright spirit” when he knew him. 
 
 “This is very emotional for me,” said Dean, who choked up on the phone. “He was a nice person, always a good guy.” ||||| Even after gunning down a TV news reporter and cameraman during a live interview, Vester Lee Flanagan II continued to rage. But after a volatile career that had seen him fired at least twice for clashing with co-workers who recall him as an off-kilter loner, this would be the former broadcaster's last, brutal sign-off. 
 
 This undated photo provided by WDBJ-TV, shows Vester Lee Flanagan II, who killed WDBJ reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward in Moneta, Va., Wednesday, Aug. 26, 2015. Flanagan was a former employee... (Associated Press) 
 
 "I've been a human powder keg for a while...just waiting to go BOOM!!!" Flanagan wrote in a rambling 23-page note faxed to ABC News soon after the shooting. 
 
 Hours after he shot his former co-workers and 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. 
 
 In the note, Flanagan — who had appeared on air using the name Bryce Williams — said he'd been discriminated against both for being black and gay. He listed grievances dating to the 2007 mass shooting at Virginia Tech and the more recent massacre of worshippers at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina. 
 
 When Flanagan was fired from Roanoke, Virginia, station WDBJ in 2013, he had to be escorted from the building by police "because he was not going to leave willingly or under his own free will," the station's former news director, Dan Dennison, said in an interview with a Hawaii station, Hawaii News Now (KHNL/KGMB). 
 
 Flanagan, 41, had "a long series of complaints against co-workers nearly from the beginning of employment at the TV station," said Dennison, now an official with the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources. "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 — reporter Alison Parker, 24, and cameraman Adam Ward, 27 — were white; Flanagan was black. 
 
 The conflict described by Dennison 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. He spoke in an interview broadcast by 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 The Associated Press 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 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 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, and graduated from San Francisco State University. 
 
 Virgil Barker, who grew up on the same tree-lined street in the Oakland hills, 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. 
 
 Before and after his work in Florida, Flanagan 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. 
 
 As word of the killings spread, friends from Oakland who knew Flanagan as a sociable kid who mixed easily in a high school with few racial tensions, struggled to connect those memories with the shooter shown on video. 
 
 "I don't remember anything bad about him," said Sasha Dansky, a high school classmate, recalling Flanagan's frequent appearance at parties. "He was just a nice, affable guy." 
 
 ___ 
 
 Geller wrote from New York. Associated Press writers Gary Fineout in Tallahassee, Florida; Garance Burke in Oakland, California; Holbrook Mohr in Jackson, Mississippi; Russ Bynum in Savannah, Georgia; Kristin Bender in San Francisco and John Raby in Roanoke, Virginia, contributed to this story.
– The Virginia gunman who killed two former colleagues during a live news broadcast yesterday morning had a long and troubling history of clashing with co-workers during his broadcasting career. At WDBJ in Roanoke, where he worked with victims Adam Ward and Alison Parker, Vester Lee Flanagan was ordered to get medical help after racking up complaints from colleagues, according to documents seen by the Guardian. "This is a mandatory referral requiring your compliance," then-news director Dan Dennison told him in July 2012, ordering him to speak to employee assistance professionals. "Failure to comply will result in termination of employment." The station gave him a final warning just before Christmas that year and he was fired three months later. Dennison, who hired Flanagan in 2011, tells Hawaii News Now that when Flanagan was fired, he refused to leave the building and they had to call police to escort him out. In court papers from a lawsuit Flanagan filed against the station, alleging racial discrimination and sexual harassment for being gay, Dennison says that as officers took Flanagan from the newsroom, he threw a hat and a wooden cross at him and said, "You'll need this." As part of the lawsuit, Flanagan accused colleagues of placing a watermelon in a "strategic location" and requested a jury made up of African-American women. According to internal memos, when police escorted Flanagan from the station, Ward videotaped it, reports the Huffington Post. The memos state that Flanagan gave Ward the finger and told him to lose his "big gut." Dennison says Flanagan had many complaints about colleagues, "largely ... along racial lines, and we did a thorough investigation and could find no evidence that anyone had racially discriminated against this man." In 2000, Flanagan was fired from Florida's WTWC-TV for what the station's former news director says was "bizarre behavior," including threatening colleagues, the AP reports. "He just had a history of playing the race card," a former WTWC anchor tells the Daily Beast. (Flanagan, who died two hours after shooting himself yesterday, left a 23-page suicide note describing the Charleston church shootings as a tipping point.)