When Alison Parker was an intern at WDBJ in 2012, Vester Lee Flanagan – then a reporter for the station – heard her utter what he apparently considered to be racist words.

Police also said that Flanagan fired a total of 17 shots during his attack on WDBJ reporter Alison Parker, 24, and cameraman Adam Ward, 27. He shot himself after authorities later caught up to him.

They were killed by a former employee of the station Wednesday as they interviewed Gardner, executive director of the Smith Mountain Lake Regional Chamber of Commerce.

She was taken to the hospital where she underwent emergency surgery.

Parker and Ward were dead and Flanagan was gone when Vicki Gardner got up and “walked to the ambulance after being shot”, her husband told ABC News.

Medical experts in Roanoke, Virginia have completed a post mortem on both victims and say that the pair also received fatal wounds to their bodies.

“The senator knows Mr. Parker and wanted to be respectful of the family’s privacy at a time of unimaginable grief”, said Hall.

Parker was hired to be a full time reporter previous year.

“(Flanagan) claimed that he watermelon kept appearing and reappearing in the newsroom”, Dennison said.

“I see the tweets and all of that stuff that says, ‘Oh gee, we’re sorry for the family, ‘ and I understand that”.

“There are too many guns in America and there are clearly too many guns in the wrong hands”, the governor said.

“Adam and Alison saw that as their mission – to awaken us to what is good and fun in life”, Marks said. “He was unstable. One time, after one of our live shots failed, he threw all his stuff down and ran into the woods for like 20 minutes”.

She said: “These people were from this area, their parents are here, our videographer Adam Ward was engaged, you know, he was going to get married and his fiancee was a morning producer so she was here when all that happened to, so it was just as disgusting as it could possibly be”.

Police were tipped to Flanagan when he sent a text message to an unidentified friend “making reference to having done something stupid”, it added.

Dennison detailed the various meetings they had with Flanagan before he was fired on February 1, 2013, which were echoed in a court filing publicly available as a result of a suit Flanagan later filed against WDBJ.