ROANOKE, Va. -- Reporter Alison Parker was 24. A "rock star." "The most radiant woman I ever met," in the words of a colleague.
Photographer Adam Ward was 27. Engaged to be married. Ready to "do something else," according to a station staffer.
On Wednesday morning, Parker and Ward, both employees of Roanoke, Virginia, TV station WDBJ, were shot to death while doing a live report from a shopping district near Moneta, Virginia. The person they were interviewing, Vicki Gardner, executive director of the Smith Mountain Lake Regional Chamber of Commerce, was shot in the back and is in surgery.
WDBJ General Manager Jeff Marks said the two were "the kindest and nicest people" at the station. He was not aware of any connection between them and suspected shooter Vester Flanagan, a former WDBJ reporter who Marks said was fired two years ago.
"Why were they the targets and not I?" he said. "What do you do? Do you imagine that everyone who leaves your company under difficult circumstances is going to take aim?"
Parker was a native of the southwest Virginia area, having grown up in Martinsville, about 50 miles south of Roanoke.
"She was living her dream," said Deon Guillory, now a reporter in Augusta, Georgia. He worked with Parker when she was an intern as a college student at James Madison University.
"She was always so eager to learn," he told CNN. "She was so enthusiastic and she was doing what she loved."
Those who knew Parker said she was warm, generous and caring. Becky Blanton met Parker after moving to Roanoke in 2013 for a health care job. Parker helped her find freelance work, sharing personal and professional contacts without hesitation.
"She welcomed me with open arms, that immediate sisterhood. That's the way she was with everyone," Blanton said. "She was networker in the truest sense; she tried to hook people up so everyone benefited."
Those attributes carried over to her reporting, Blanton said. Parker often reported on the chamber of commerce -- as she was doing the day she died -- with a knack for finding the human stories in business news.
"She cared about her stories she and took a genuine interest in what people said," Blanton said. "She would look for personal details and ask the questions others didn't ask."
Chris Hurst, an anchor at the station, said on social media that he and Parker were "very much in love." They had just gotten a place together.
"I am numb," he wrote. "She was the most radiant woman I ever met. And for some reason she loved me back. She loved her family, her parents and her brother."
"Your thoughts and prayers mean the world to me," he said.
Anchor Kimberly McBroom called Parker a "rock star."
"You throw anything at that girl and she could do it," McBroom said.
In her station biography, Parker said she liked to "whitewater kayak, play with her parents' dog Jack, and attend community theater events."
Parker did some reporting for CNN last year, reporting on a snowstorm in the Roanoke area. Guillory, her former colleague, said you could see her effervescent personality in that clip.
"You can even seen her smiling in the snow. That was the kind of person Alison was," he said.
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia, tweeted his sympathy.
Photographer Adam Ward had been with WDBJ since July 2011, according to a LinkedIn page believed to belong to him. He graduated from Virginia Tech in 2011 with a bachelor's degree in communication.
"Adam was a delightful person. He worked hard -- you could tell he loved what he was doing," said Virginia Tech professor Robert Denton, who taught Ward in classes and worked with him as a guest broadcaster at WDBJ.
"He wasn't afraid to pitch in and do whatever was necessary for the broadcast. He did whatever was needed with a smile and with grace. He was simply a very nice young man and very professional."
Ward was recently engaged, according to Solina Lewis, a journalist who said she was a friend of his fiancee, Melissa Ott.
"He was an incredible person, a great journalist and would have been a great father and husband," Lewis said in a statement posted on @Breaking911.
"He was sweet, hard working, he came over to my apartment and put furniture together for me without Melissa even there," she said. "Even though he had to get up for work and do the early morning live shot the next day."
Another journalist at the anchor desk said Ward was engaged to be married to Ott, a morning show producer at WDBJ. Ward told her, "I'm going to get out of news. I think I'm going to do something else."
