Alison Parker grew up in Martinsville, the small Virginia town near the Carolina line that her father Andy still calls home. She attended Patrick Henry Community College, graduated in 2009, and went on to James Madison University. She interned at WDBJ in 2012 — the station she had grown up watching — and after graduating took her first full-time television job at WCTI-TV in New Bern, North Carolina, as a general assignment reporter. In 2014 she came home to Roanoke, hired by WDBJ as a correspondent for the morning newscast Mornin. She was dating fellow WDBJ reporter Chris Hurst at the time of her death. Patrick Henry Community College, where she had once been a student, established the Alison Bailey Parker Memorial Scholarship in her name; it is awarded each year to a student studying media design and production. JMU dedicated the Alison B. Parker studio in Harrison Hall to her in 2017.

Adam Ward was born in Daleville and grew up in Salem, where his father Buddy worked as a guidance counselor at Salem High School. He went to Virginia Tech, graduating in 2011 with a degree in communications and media studies, and started at WDBJ that July as a videographer. He occasionally filed sports reports as well. In the mornings, when most of Roanoke was still asleep, he was usually behind the camera. After his death, the Salem Educational Foundation and Alumni Association established the Adam Ward Scholarship fund in his name. The memorial gathering at Salem brought together a community that had known him as a kid.

At Bridgewater Plaza, twenty-six miles southeast of Roanoke, Parker, Ward, and Gardner were on a live shot at 6:46 a.m. EDT. Video later reviewed by investigators shows that the shooter — a former WDBJ multimedia journalist who had been dismissed in February 2013 — walked up to the scene with a Glock 19 pistol. He stood near the interview for roughly fifteen seconds, holding the weapon. Gardner later said she had been blinded by the camera's lighting. Then he opened fire. Eight gunshots are audible in the broadcast feed before Ward's camera fell. Seventeen shots were fired in total. Parker and Ward died at the scene. Gardner, executive director of the Smith Mountain Lake Regional Chamber of Commerce, was rushed to Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital. Surgeons removed her right kidney and part of her colon. She was released on September 8, 2015.

Staff in the WDBJ newsroom identified the shooter from images on Ward's fallen camera and alerted general manager Jeffrey Marks, who passed the information to the Franklin County sheriff. The killer abandoned his Ford Mustang at the Roanoke-Blacksburg Regional Airport, drove a rented Chevrolet Sonic north on I-81 and east on I-66, and was identified by an automated license plate reader at 11:20 a.m. After a brief pursuit, the rental ran off the road near Markham in Fauquier County. He had shot himself while driving. He was airlifted to Inova Fairfax Hospital and declared dead at 1:26 p.m. His suicide note, faxed to ABC News at 8:26 a.m., laid out grievances and admirations and threats that no narrative needs to repeat. President Obama said he was heartbroken. Governor Terry McAuliffe said the same and used the moment to reassert his support for gun control, drawing criticism from political opponents. Alison Parker's father, Andy, became one of the country's most persistent advocates for both stronger gun laws and accountability from social media platforms that allowed footage of his daughter's murder to keep circulating; he testified before Congress in July 2019 about the work of the HONR Network and the difficulty of getting Google and Facebook to act. Vicki Gardner returned to her chamber of commerce work and remained executive director until 2019. The newscast went on the next morning. The work of telling Roanoke its stories continued. The grief did too.