What are they hiding? Police order BBC reporter to destroy evidence of VA shooter’s crashed vehicle

Two reporters for the BBC ran into a big problem recently when they were attempting to cover the race-related double murder, on-air, of journalist Alison Parker and her cameraman, Adam Ward, by disgruntled former station personality Vester Lee Flanagan II.

After he shot Parker and Ward, Flanagan fled, leading police on a manhunt before he eventually shot and killed himself.

“The suspect vehicle refused to stop and sped away from the trooper. Minutes later, the suspect vehicle ran off the road and crashed. The troopers approached the vehicle and found the male driver suffering from a gunshot wound. He is being transported to a nearby hospital for treatment of life-threatening injuries,” the Virginia State Police reported, according to GovtSlaves.info.

BBC reporters Franz Strasser and Tara McKelvey, reporting from the scene of the crash, were told by police to surrender their video or destroy it, leaving them only with low-quality cell phone video footage.

“Reason for confiscating camera was that it was evidence. Threatened to tow the car because it was illegally parked” Strasser said in one tweet.

“But why they are then okay with deleting ‘evidence’ makes one question their reasoning,” he said in a follow-on tweet.

Later in the day of the murder and manhunt, August 26, Corinne Geller, the public relations manager for the Virginia State Police, tweeted at Strasser: “VSP is aware of this incident and we are looking into it, as such actions violate VSP policy.”

There are other anomalies associated with the Flanagan incident as well.

First, as noted by Ben Shapiro, editor-at-large of Breitbart News, there is much about the incident that is being treated hypocritically by the mainstream media, like ignoring the fact that this was a race-motivated crime: Parker and Ward were white; Flanagan was black.

Also, Flanagan was an admitted homosexual; the two he murdered were straight.

The mainstream media has been very selective in how it is reporting the story. Initially, reports were limited primarily to the contents of a rambling 23-page “suicide manifesto” by Flanagan, who was known on-air as Bryce Williams, in which he laid out a series of grievances ranging from perceived homosexual sleights to expressions of extreme racial animosity towards Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who killed several worshippers at a historical black church in Charleston, S.C., last month. Flanagan even used the term “race war” to taunt Roof.

What is also telling is that the MSM is much more interested in covering the gun control angle – that is, the vow by Parker’s father to push lawmakers on Capitol Hill relentlessly for “new gun control laws” that will essentially empower government bureaucrats to pick and choose who can and cannot engage in their Second Amendment rights by deeming them “mentally unfit.”

Other claims regarding the timing of tweets by Chris Hurst, Parker’s boyfriend – that he tweeted about his loss and their secret relationship minutes before the murders actually took place – appear to have been false. Twitter timestamps in the Pacific time zone would make it appear as though that were the case, but Hurst’s account showed the tweets came much later (he is in the Eastern time zone).

But the gun control angle is probably the most important, because as we’ve seen in the past, anti-gun politicians and the Obama Administration use every high-profile murder to push for “new gun control measures” that would only disarm the vulnerable and empower the criminal. And Parker’s father is leading the charge in this instance.

As for the BBC reporters’ claims, at least the VSP stepped up and pointed out that the confiscation policy is not standard.

Sources:

GovtSlaves.info

Breitbart News

Snopes.com