Despite positive cancer prognosis, Fresno TV news anchor retiring from KMPH

The idea was always that Monty Torres would return to KMPH.

That was the message when he took medical leave following a lung cancer diagnosis in October. “I would like to be able to come back. To come back and tell everybody I’m still here and that God is good,” the evening news anchor told The Bee at the time.

“I’d like to be able to share that message.”

And he did, in a video segment to viewers on Thursday.

“My symptoms have nearly all disappeared,” Torres said in a nearly three-minute segment, in which he also announced his official retirement from the station.

“After more than 20 years as part of the FOX 26 news family, I am here tonight to also sadly announce that I will not be returning to the news desk.”

According to the message, Torres will remain in the Valley with his family to focus on his recovery, unless “God sends us somewhere else.”

Torres discovered he had non-small cell lung cancer after a partially collapsed right lung landed him in the emergency department. The cancer was inoperable and incurable, “but still treatable,” he told viewers at the time. In late October, he began a treatment plan that attacked the “mutations within the cell line of the cancer itself.”

A recent biopsy of trace fluid from his lung showed “no malignant cells present,” Torres said Thursday. “That does not mean there may not still be cancer someplace else in my body. ... That was certainly a great find. And a good place to start.”

Torres joined KMPH as an anchor in 2006. It was a return at the station, where he had worked as a general assignment reporter in the 1990s.

Before coming back to Fresno, he was in Raleigh, North Carolina as a morning show anchor for the NBC station. He also produced and hosted several public affairs shows, including one aimed at the state’s Hispanic population.

ABC30 loses two on-air personalities

The retirement isn’t the only recent shakeup in Fresno’s TV news landscape.

Last week, ABC30 sports anchor Stephen Hicks announced Friday will be his last broadcast with the Action News team. He is leaving, after eight years, for Los Angeles to be with his soon-to-be wife.

He joins Gabe Ferris, who announced he’s leaving the station after a two-year stint at a city hall reporter. Ferris is heading to Chicago, where he will work for the owned-and-operated ABC 7. He will remain on-air into July.