Gunman in live TV shooting vowed to make the headlines

Vester Flanagan fulfilled a threat to put his conflict with colleagues into “the headlines” when he gunned down two employees of a Virginia TV station during a live morning broadcast – one of them a cameraman who had filmed his sacking two years earlier.

But as station employees struggled to explain the events that framed Flanagan’s anger, others who had run across the gunman in the time since he lost his job at WDBJ-TV described a man whose hair-trigger temper was increasingly set off by slights that were more often imagined than real.