THANKS TO THE INTERNET, SOCIAL MEDIA, and outlets like YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram, everybody’s a star, all the world’s a stage, and many performers are dying on it. Travel vloggers fall off cliffs and waterfalls while taking selfies or making cell phone videos. Amateur daredevils die while live-streaming stunts. Social media graduate Christina Grimmie, a YouTube singing star who entered the mainstream when she competed on NBC’s competition series The Voice, was shot to death by an “obsessed” stranger on June 10, 2016, while meeting fans after a show in Orlando, Florida. (Her murder has almost been forgotten, overshadowed when, less than two days later, a terrorist gunman killed forty-nine people at the Pulse nightclub in the same city.)
Then there’s Prentis Robinson, a musician and self-described “Art & Intertainment Director & Producer” from Wingate, North Carolina. As “Cowboy//Django,” the fifty-five-year-old African American performed for thousands of his Facebook friends via the Facebook Live streaming feature. His Facebook page was filled with videos of him wearing a cowboy hat, playing acoustic guitar and singing, and also walking the streets of his town with a cell phone selfie stick, pointing out criminality in his neighborhood.
He was taking one of those walks on the morning of Monday, February 26, 2018, live-streaming with his selfie stick, when he encountered someone off camera and called out several times, “You on live!” The person responded by firing four shots. Prentis Robinson fell dead on the social media stage. The cell phone on the end of the stick landed camera lens up and streamed someone jumping over his body. Facebook Live allows viewers to post comments in real time. A few seconds after the shots rang out, someone commented, “Omg.”
It was known as “America’s first social media murder”: the killing of a television news reporter and cameraman, recorded by the gunman’s own POV cell phone camera, posted on his Facebook and Twitter accounts, and spread worldwide—and broadcast live on television to thousands of viewers.
The unlikely incident occurred on the morning of August 25, 2015. Alison Parker, a twenty-four-year-old general-assignment reporter for WDBJ-TV Channel 7 News in Roanoke, Virginia, and videographer Adam Ward, twenty-seven, were “going live” at Bridgewater Plaza, an outdoor shopping center on the popular Smith Mountain Lake recreation area.
Outdoors, on a wooden walkway, Parker was interviewing Vicki Gardner, director of the local chamber of commerce, about events marking the fiftieth anniversary of the lake’s creation. Ward had the camera on his right shoulder, with a portable light shining on his two subjects as the interview aired live on the Mornin’ program, the local lead-in to the national CBS Morning News.
At 6:46 AM, in the middle of the interview, at least eight gunshots rang out. Alison Parker screamed and ran; the camera fell and, for a flash, captured the image of the gunman holding a Glock 19 9 mm pistol. The control room cut back to the studio and a shot of Mornin’ host Kimberly McBroom, open-mouthed in shock.
The shooter got away. He was soon identified as Vester Flanagan, a former WDBJ reporter who was holding a grudge against Parker and others at the station. At 11:14 AM, Flanagan uploaded a fifty-six-second phone-camera video, shot from a first-person perspective, to his Twitter and Facebook accounts.
The video reveals his point of view as he walks up to the scene of the live interview and shows that he is holding a handgun for approximately fifteen seconds without Ward, Parker, or Gardner noticing. Cameraman Ward moves off the interview to pan across the shopping area, and Flanagan appears to wait until the camera is again pointed at Parker to ensure the shooting is shown live to the television audience.
Flanagan later shot himself during a car chase with police officers and was pronounced dead at a hospital. The state medical examiner determined that Parker died of “gunshot wounds of the head and chest”; Ward of “gunshot wounds of head and torso.” Vicki Gardner was shot in the back. She lost her right kidney and part of her colon but survived.
The killings occurred amid a rash of mass shootings in the United States and a national debate over gun violence and led to conspiracy theories that the shooting of Alison Parker and Adam Ward was a hoax, cooked up by the mainstream media to gain support for stricter gun regulations.
Today you fly with me!
Armin Schmieder was at the forefront of entertainment technology on August 26, 2016. He was before a worldwide audience via his cell phone camera and the latest social media gimmick. Facebook Live had been introduced on April 6 in a Facebook post by the network’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg: “Live is like having a TV camera in your pocket. Anyone with a phone now has the power to broadcast to anyone in the world . . .”
Seven weeks before Schmieder’s event, Diamond “Lavish” Reynolds took out her cell phone and used Facebook Live to broadcast the death of her boyfriend Philando Castile in the front seat of a car, moments after he was shot by a police officer during a traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. On this day, Schmieder would take the feature to new heights, with the TV camera literally in his pocket.
Schmieder was allowing his Facebook friends and others to join him on a flight—a wingsuit flight through the Swiss Alps—in real time. Schmieder propped up his cell phone—unfortunately making the amateur mistake of positioning it vertically rather than horizontally—to stream the video, which ultimately would run for seven minutes and eleven seconds.
The sequence begins with Schmieder on a mountaintop near Kandersberg, a popular spot for BASE jumpers. He is climbing into his wingsuit and, oddly, perhaps in nervousness at being the star, gives the middle finger to those watching, laughing as he gets his gear and equipment together. He zips into the suit, which contains fabric between the legs and under the arms that allows him to lift from a vertical drop into flight, before a parachute is deployed for landing.
He laughs while he narrates in German, putting on his sunglasses and a helmet, fitted with a GoPro camera and light, then turns the cell phone camera to reveal a view of the jagged peaks and lush valley he’s about to fly into. He waves goodbye with a “ta ta” and puts the cell phone in his pocket.
The picture turns to a blurry pink-orange; the Facebook friends are now looking at the inside of his wingsuit pocket. They’ll only be able to hear—not see—the flight in real time. “The viewer sees nothing but . . . the sound,” reported Blick, Zurich’s daily German-language newspaper. “But this is all the more disturbing.”
Schmieder makes his jump at around the six-minute mark. He’s heard to say, “Today you fly with me!” He says “one, two” in German, and then there is the loud rushing of air—and, about twenty-five seconds later, a scream. Next comes the sound of tumbling and a brutal impact.
“Then,” Blick reported, “there is silence—only the bells of cows can be heard.” Armin Schmieder, the newspaper reported, died “live on Facebook.” Schmieder, an Italian citizen, was twenty-eight and had a young child. According to a friend, “He was an experienced skydiver but flew only a year with the wingsuit.”
Once the tragedy was publicized, the video made its way swiftly to YouTube, where it began to generate hundreds of thousands of views.