On August 26, 2015, two employees of CBS affiliate WDBJ of Roanoke, Virginia, were shot dead while conducting a live television interview near Smith Mountain Lake in Moneta.
They were 24-year-old news reporter Alison Parker and 27-year-old photojournalist Adam Ward.
The gunman was a former WDBJ reporter, 41-year-old Vester Lee Flanagan II, also known by the professional pseudonym of Bryce Williams, who was fired for disruptive conduct in 2013.After a 5-hour manhunt, Flanagan shot himself during a car chase with police officers and died later at a hospital.
Alison’s father, Andy Parker, interviewed by Megyn Kelly on Fox News, immediately called for gun control. He vowed:
“I’m not gonna let this issue [gun control] drop. You know, we’ve got to do something about crazy people getting guns. And I, you know, the problem that you guys have got ahead, I know it’s a news business and this is a big story, but next week it ain’t gonna be a story any more and everybody’s gonna forget it. But you mark my words: My mission in life, and I talked to the governor [Terry McAuliffe, a gun control advocate] and he called me and he said, and I told him I’m gonna do something, whatever it takes to get gun legislation to shame people, to shame legislators into doing something to close loopholes in background checks and making sure crazy people don’t get guns. And he said, ‘You go, I’m right there with you.’ So this is not the last you heard of me. This is something that’s Alison’s legacy that I wanna make happen.”
Note: Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, an ardent advocate of gun control, was co-chairman of President Bill Clinton’s 1996 re-election campaign and chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. He’s a cousin of Syracuse law professor Sharon McAuliffe, who some suspect is school teacher Sharon Christa McAuliffe who allegedly died in the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger explosion. (See “Are the crew members of 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger still alive?“) Coincidentally, Terry McAuliffe is also very much concerned about NASA funding issues. See here and here.
It turns out Andy Parker is a former actor.
On his LinkedIn page, Parker, who is now a “headhunter for the banking industry,” claims to have been a “professional actor” in his youth, for 6 years from 1979 to 1985, in the greater New York City area, and had “appeared on Broadway in “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas”, and at the Kennedy Center in “Pump Boys & Dinettes,” as well as “numerous regional stage credits and regional and national TV commercials.”
Under the section “Volunteer Experience & Causes,” Parker says he’s the founder of a “community theater organization” called TheatreWorks Community Players (TWCP), where he served as the board president for more than 6 years, from 2004 to 2010. TWCP went from staging “one summer production a year, to full seasons in its own black box theater.”
From his bio above, it is not unreasonable for us to gather that Andy Parker is a failed actor who never made it “big time,” but retained his interest in acting, as evidenced by his founding of the community theater.
Is Andy Parker another crisis actor?
Here are the screenshots I took of Andy Parker’s LinkedIn page, in case he scrubs it in the days to come. (Click images to enlarge)
H/t Professor Doom 1
~Éowyn
