“It’s going to be a long investigation” even though the suspect is dead, Franklin County Sheriff Bill Overton said today in the first media briefing regarding the murder of two Virginia reporters on live television.
The suspect, Vester Flanigan (aka, Bryce Williams), died at Fairfax INOVA of self-inflicted gunshot wounds at approximately 1:30PM, Overton reported in his update on the shooting deaths of WDBJ reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward.
Asked what will happen next, Sheriff Overton said:
“It’s going to be a long investigation because there’s a lot of components, certainly, to this investigation, and we’re still right in the beginning stages of it, so it’s going to be quite a while.”
Among the components making the case so complex are reporters' questions on the role race played in the killer's motive and how the killer knew where the victims were going to be at the time of the fatal attack.
Sheriff Overton said he knew the victims and had recently been interviewed by both Parker and Ward at a remote site about school openings.