News anchor Chris Hurst, whose girlfriend and another co-worker were gunned down during a live broadcast in August 2015, will leave the Roanoke, Virginia, TV station and mount a run for the state House of Delegates, he said Sunday.
The WDBJ-7 anchor’s final broadcast was last Thursday night and he resigned on Friday. Hurst said he plans to file paperwork Monday to run as a Democrat for the 12th District seat currently held by Republican Joseph R. Yost.
“I can categorically tell you that my life was not going to be like this if it weren’t for the tragedy that happened,” Hurst said in a phone interview Sunday. “I knew that I couldn’t stay at the station because it was just too emotionally painful for me.”
Hurst, who joined the station as a reporter in 2010 and became evening anchor in 2011, covered crime and courts, with special assignments on mental health and opioid abuse.
He was struck by personal tragedy on August 26, 2015, when a disgruntled former employee, Vester Lee Flanagan II, 41, opened fire on 24-year-old reporter Alison Parker and 27-year-old cameraman Adam Ward during an early-morning on-air interview at Smith Mountain Lake, about five hours southwest of Washington, D.C. Flanagan, who uploaded footage of the killings to his Twitter and Facebook pages, later shot himself in his car.
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Hurst and Parker had dated for nine months, and Hurst said they had wanted to get married.
In running for office, Hurst said he wants to tackle a wide range of issues, from parity in education funding, to giving businesses and start-ups incentive to relocate to southwest Virginia.
He will also work to ensure “fewer families have to go through what I went through,” said Hurst, whose plans to run for office were first reported by The Roanoke Times.
Hurst supports universal background checks for gun owners and wants to give law enforcement the tools to remove dangerous firearms from dangerous situations – rather than just prevent their sale or transfer. At the same time, he said, “people think that I’m going to try to take everybody’s guns away and that’s the last thing I wanna do.”
“People have been raised on hunting, they’ve been raised on going to the range with their father and mother and learning how to shoot, my brother taught me how to shoot. I just wanna make sure that law enforcement knows who the most dangerous people in our communiteis are.”
Yost, of Blacksburg, could not immediately be reached for comment.
(c) 2017, The Washington Post ยท Faiz Siddiqui
