A chilling manifesto, faxed to ABC News apparently by the man suspected of killing two journalists Wednesday during a live broadcast, cited a racist massacre in Charleston, South Carolina as a motive for the crime.
In the document, ABC News reported, the author blames Wednesday’s shooting on the shooting at a historical black church in Charleston, South Carolina in June.
Sometime between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, ABC News received the 23-page document from “Bryce Williams,” a name used on a Twitter account being attributed to the suspect.
The network turned it over to authorities.
.@ABC News received a 23-page fax from someone who says he is Bryce Williams. We have turned it over to authorities. http://t.co/rE7t0hCzj9
— ABC News (@ABC) August 26, 2015
According to ABC News, the author wrote:
“Why did I do it? I put down a deposit for a gun on 6/19/15. The Church shooting in Charleston happened on 6/17/15…”
“What sent me over the top was the church shooting. And my hollow point bullets have the victims’ initials on them.”
The document’s author praised the Virginia Tech mass killing, saying the shooter in that incident “got NEARLY double the amount” of deaths than the shooters at Columbine High School in 1999.
WDBJ reporter Alison Parker, 24, and photographer Adam Ward, 27, were shot and killed during a live broadcast just before 7 a.m. in Moneta, Va. Their interview subject, Vicki Gardner, was wounded in the attack. She’s now stable.
Virginia State Troopers said they found the suspect, Vester Lee Flanagan (who is known professionally as Bryce Williams), in his car with life-threatening injuries from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
I have a tiny sliver of hope that this will have a nation wide impact in the news community and cause journalists to start questioning the insanity of the NRA and our gun fetish culture.
I know, but I’m an optimist.
I also hope we soon reach the tipping point with the American public who will pressure more politicians at all levels to expose and overturn ALEC gun laws. May it start in this corner of Virginia.
Delusional?
Hold on to it. I gave up on all hope when twenty first graders were slaughtered–some almost cut in half–along with half a dozen heroic educators who literally threw their bodies in front of the bullets to try to protect the children and it failed to do more than generate a two week burst of impotent outrage. Didn’t even change the GOP’s continuing campaign of slander and denigration of educators.
It’s not that they’re oblivious, believe me. It’s that there’s a longstanding feeling in most American journalists that to let your own opinions color your coverage is “editorializing,” which is bad unless it’s in an editorial. In effect they treat the various sides of a controversy as equally worthy of respect, even if they privately think one side makes a lot of sense and the other side is stupid and crazy. Very smart, very confident journalists can convey the relative strength and weakness of the various sides’ arguments, but it’s rare. And with profits down, nobody wants to rock the boat anyway. So it’s not like there’ll be some come-to-Jesus tipping point. The problem is baked in. But if you want to be optimistic, the public does want a saner approach to gun control. If we can pry the gun lobby out of the GOP’s cold, dead hands and show it the door we’ll have progress.