WE ARE NO LONGER A CIVILIZED NATION
Slain reporter’s parents:
“WE ARE a nation who has politicians who are cowards,” Barbara Parker told the Daily News during an emotional interview Saturday as she and her husband Andy for the first time shared the gripping details of how they found out their daughter Alison (l.) had been shot. “What kind of society are we? What does it take?”
THE MOTHER of slain television journalist Alison Parker is past her breaking point — and wonders why more Americans aren’t there with her.
“We are no longer a civilized country,” Barbara Parker told the Daily News in her most dramatic and damning comments since her daughter and a colleague were murdered on live television.
“We are a nation who has politicians who are cowards,” she said Saturday in the family’s Virginia home. “What kind of a society are we? What does it take? After Sandy Hook elementary school children were killed. And nobody does anything. “What does it say about us?” Andy Parker, who said his daughter’s funeral will be private for family and friends, is just as astounded that more people aren’t stirred by the litany of death and destruction.
“The problem is, it just keeps going,” he said. “We as a society have become so desensitized to it.”
The couple, in a wide-ranging interview, recounted the scene at their suburban house on the morning of the attack.
The television was turned off when the phone started ringing. Nothing was the same once the voice on the other end spoke.
“There’s been a shooting,” said a colleague of their daughter, WDBJTV morning show reporter Alison Parker. “We don’t know anything.”
Andy Parker, with a dad’s intuition, felt the bad vibes instantly. He hoped for the best, and braced for the worst.
“Right then and there, I had this awful feeling in the pit of my stomach,” Parker told The News in his Virginia home. “My heart was just sinking. I thought, ‘Maybe she’s just hurt.’ ”
She was not. The 24-year-old journalist, along with her cameraman, was gone in a muzzle flash of violence, killed by an angry and armed ex-station worker. The couple, after a heartbreaking and head-spinning 72 hours, emerged as the newest voices in the fight for gun control.
Alison, whose high school photo stands alongside an angel figurine in the family home, remains her father’s inspiration and motivation.
“I know she’s here, and she always will be,” a sobbing Parker said Saturday, pointing at his heart. “She would be saying, ‘I’m proud of you, Dad.’ ”
The feeling was mutual. Andy and Barbara remembered their daughter as a whirlwind, a smart and athletic kid who chased and caught her dreams.
Alison moved with her family from Georgia to Virginia at age 6, and grew up in the same woodsy neighborhood where her parents still reside.
“Everything she picked up, she did well,” recalled Andy Parker. “She was a gymnast. She was a dancer. She was kinda nerdy in school. She was on the robotics team.”
Alison initially thought about becoming a doctor before opting for a career in journalism. She graduated from James Madison University, worked as an intern at WDBJ in Roanoke, and landed a full-
time on-air job.
“She decided, ‘Well, you know, a reporter would be better because I could cover these things,’ ” her dad recalled. “She was blond and pretty. She had such poise. She made everybody, all the people she interviewed, always made them feel comfortable.”
Andy and Barbara are now bent on making people feel uncomfortable: Gun lobbyists, NRA mouthpieces, gutless elected officials.
The shooting of their daughter and cameraman Adam Ward, 27, by Vester Lee Flanagan, 41, added suburban Moneta, Va., to the grim geography of high-profile American gun murders from Charleston, S.C., to Littleton, Colo., to Newtown, Conn.
Barbara Parker, who recalls once meeting her daughter’s killer, now refuses to speak his name — as if it’s an obscenity. “I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of any kind of recognition,” she said.
Andy Parker added that he will never watch the video shot by Ward as an unsuspecting Alison interviewed the lone surviving victim, Vicki Gardner.
“I’m not going to do it,” he said adamantly. “I’ve not turned the TV on since Wednesday. I’m not going to watch it. Thank God I wasn’t watching it (live).”
The devastated dad said he and his wife would usually watch an online replay of the morning news show to catch up with Alison’s work.
“Whenever we’d watch, I’d send her a text and say, ‘Oh, that was a great job,’ ” said Andy. “She’d reply, ‘Thanks, Dad.’ ”
But when Parker tried to contact Alison after the Wednesday phone call, there was no answer at all.
“When I called her, it went straight to voicemail,” he said. “And I knew something was wrong because she would have called me right away and said, ‘Dad, I’m OK.’”
Andy Parker is already making good on his promise to fight on his daughter’s behalf.
A Friday meeting with Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe elicited immediate support, and Parker just spoke with Mark Kelly — the husband of Gabby Giffords, the ex-congresswoman and gun violence survivor. He’s also eager to speak with former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an outspoken proponent of gun control legislation since his days in City Hall.
“We would welcome the opportunity to work with Mr. Parker,” said Erika Soto Lamb, spokeswoman for Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety group.
Parker is bristling to make changes in state laws, in background checks, in gunshow loopholes and eventually in federal legislation. Alison’s boyfriend, Chris Hurst, who is an anchor at WDBJ, plans to join in the effort.
“I’m trying to get all the groups that are out there, and somehow find a way to galvanize everyone,” said Parker, who knows the task ahead is Herculean.
“I’m so emotionally drained,” he said, breaking down once more. “If anything can come out of this, it’s that this mission will be my life’s work.
“They messed with the wrong family.”