On August 26, 2015, 24-year-old news reporter Alison Parker and 27-year-old photojournalist Adam Ward, both of Roanoke, Virginia, CBS affiliate WDBJ, were conducting a live television interview near Smith Mountain Lake in Moneta, Virginia, when they were murdered by a gunman. The person they were interviewing, Vicki Gardner of the Smith Mountain Lake Regional Chamber of Commerce, was shot in the back during the attack but survived. Parker and Ward died at the scene. They are the seventh and eighth journalists to be killed while in the line of work in the U.S. since 1992.
The attacker was later confirmed to be Vester Lee Flanagan II, also known as Bryce Williams, a former reporter at WDBJ who had been forced to leave the station two years prior. After a manhunt and car chase, Flanagan shot himself and later died at a hospital.
