Boyfriend of reporter killed on live TV elected delegate in Virginia

The boyfriend of a news reporter shot and killed on live TV in 2015 has won a seat in Virginia’s House of Delegates Tuesday to fight for issues he said were important to them both.

Chris Hurst and Alison Parker were more than collegial reporters at at Roanoke’s WDBJ7. They were a couple, and had just moved in together when tragedy struck.

Parker, 24, went out to cover a story at the Chamber of Commerce on Aug. 26, 2015, when a former co-worker killed her and her cameraman before turning the gun on himself.

To honor her life, Hurst, a former news anchor, ran for state office on a gun control platform — against an NRA-endorsed Republican incumbent.

“After it happened, the support from the community was overwhelming,” Hurst, 30, told a radio station before the election.”Becoming an elected official and a public servant seemed like a natural progression for me."

But Hurst, a Democrat, who defeated three-term incumbent Republican Joseph Yost, said he won’t try to push legislation to ban guns.

"I have no intention of trying to ban or prohibit any type of class of weapon. I would never want to legislate someone's culture or their way of life. But I do think that there is work that we could do through a gun violence protective order to reasonably — for a set amount of time — remove a gun from a dangerous situation. Nobody just snaps. There's always something that is occurring — a pattern.”

Parker and cameraman Adam Ward, 27, were shot to death at the Bridgewater Plaza in Moneta, Va., on live television by a former colleague and reporter Vester Lee Flanagan II, 41, who had been fired from the station two years earlier.

Flanagan recorded the shooting.