WTVD airs footage of Cary police shooting bank robber

The final moments of a bank robbery-turned-hostage situation in Cary were carried on the live local news this afternoon, and two local stations found themselves in a sticky situation when that scene turned deadly.

WRAL showed footage of the suspect leading a hostage from the Wachovia bank with a gun to the hostage's head, and then cut away right before the man was shot dead by police. WTVD also cut away from the scene, but when they returned, they say they accidentally showed a replay that included footage of the robber being shot. On subsequent replays, footage of the man being shot was not shown.

WTVD news director Rob Elmore says showing the video was a mistake.

"We had no intention of showing a man being shot, and certainly we didn't want to do that, and we regret that we did."

Elmore explained that the station went to a commercial break when police began to approach the suspect and the hostage, and didn't return to air until after the man had been shot. "Where the problem came in was requeuing the tape after the break," he said.

When WTVD returned from their commercial break, Elmore says they ran the video with the intention to stop the tape before the man was shot. "But that didn't happen," he said. "We certainly didn't intend to show that. And Steve Daniels wasn't calling for the tape of the shooting to be shown again, he was asking for clarification of what happened."

"I've directed all of our stations to never show that again," Elmore said.

WRAL news director Rick Gall said this evening that WRAL also intentionally cut away from the scene to avoid airing a live situation that might end badly.

"It appeared to the staff we have in the control room that one of the people exiting the bank was or might be the suspect, and usually that doesn't end well," he said. "Recognizing that, we intentionally cut away from the video so that we wouldn't show something that ends badly. That's not something we want to show on our newscast. We don't want to show it live or show it on tape."

Gall adds that the station does have the incident on tape, but they will not show it.

People watching live were talking about the jarring footage. On the Inside Carolina sports message board this afternoon, this message was posted just after the scene unfolded live:

heel79: Man, WRAL following a story in which a guy took hostages at Cary bank, looks like he was surrendering, they showed him walking a hostage out of the bank and then WRAL cut away, came back a couple of minutes later and SWAT team had shot him dead. Apparently he had a gun to the hostage's head and they had seen enough. WRAL is lucky or unlucky they didn't broadcast a man being shot to death.

Luvy1 replied: WTVD had it. Guy hit the ground like a sack of bricks.