Man Who Killed 5 Persons In Newsroom Had Vendetta Against Newspaper

Washington: The man accused of killing five Capital Gazette staff members had threatened the newspaper in 2013 and continued to pepper social media with dark and often profane warnings. But until Thursday, the attacks had been only words.

That changed when Jarrod Ramos blasted out the glass doors of the newsroom near Annapolis at 2:40 p.m. and unleashed his rampage, police said, shooting with a legally purchased 12-gauge pump-action shotgun until he finally laid it down and hid under a desk as police arrived.

Anne Arundel County State’s Attorney Wes Adams said Ramos’s actions, including barricading a back door so that people could not escape and his “tactical approach of hunting down and shooting the innocent victims,” was evidence of a “coordinated attack.”

On Friday, a judge ordered that Ramos, 38, remain in custody and be held without bond on five counts of murder as Ramos appeared via a video feed from a detention center. At the bond hearing, Adams called Ramos an “overwhelming threat and danger to our community.”

The threats in 2013 came amid a lawsuit Ramos filed accusing the paper of defaming him through a column describing his pleading guilty to harassing a woman over social media. The defamation case was dismissed.

Ramos’s obsession with a former Arundel High School classmate, which started with his making contact on Facebook in late 2009 or early 2010, caused at least two criminal charges and three peace orders to be lodged against him and probably cost him his job with the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the summer of 2014.

The Capital Gazette and its lawyer had reported threats made in May 2013 and spoke with a detective who investigated. The newspaper decided not to pursue criminal charges because it might “exacerbate” the situation, Anne Arundel County Police Chief Timothy J. Altomare said Friday during a news conference.

Until 2016, when courts rejected a last round of his many appeals, Ramos pursued his claim that he had been wronged by the paper. And he took to Twitter to call out the people he insisted had wronged him.

Over a four-year span, from late 2011 to early 2016, Ramos waged a social media campaign against the Capital Gazette. He tweeted at the newspaper’s official account, @capgaznews, 149 times. He mentioned the name of the columnist — Eric Hartley — 101 times, and a dozen times named Thomas Marquardt, the paper’s former editor.

“I’ll enjoy seeing @capgaznews cease publication, but it would be nicer to see Hartley and Marquardt cease breathing,” he posted on Feb. 2, 2015.

He also repeatedly referred to the 2015 Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris, where al-Qaeda-affiliated gunmen killed 12 people and injured 11 others at the offices of the French satirical newspaper.

Explaining Friday to a judge why Ramos should remain in custody, Adams said Ramos worked his way through the newsroom, shooting victims along the way. “There was one victim that attempted to escape through the back door but was shot,” he told the judge. Ramos also used smoke grenades, police said.


Four journalists and a sales associate for the Capital Gazette were killed, and two people suffered what police called minor injuries. The shootings are believed to be the deadliest attack on journalists in the United States.

On Friday, the opinion page of the Capital Gazette read, “Today we are speechless.”

It went on, “This page is intentionally left blank today to commemorate victims of Thursday’s shooting at our office.”

The victims were Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen, John McNamara, Rebecca Smith and Wendi Winters. Fischman and Hiaasen were editors, McNamara was a reporter, Smith was a sales assistant and Winters worked for special publications, according to the newspaper’s website.

The two people injured were likely hit by broken glass, according to officials.

Ramos appeared in the video feed in court in a blue, V-neck jail uniform. He said nothing and stared expressionless at the camera. Heis unemployed and lives alone, according to testimony..

Police said that after a search of his Laurel apartment Thursday, they found evidence, which they did not detail, showing that he had planned the attack.

Ramos acted alone, driving a rental car to the newspaper office, police said. Three minutes before the gunfire, he tweeted an obscenity at a judge who had rejected his defamation suit against the paper.

Within about a minute of entering the newsroom in response to reports of a shooter, police found Ramos hiding beneath a desk, authorities said. No gunfire was exchanged, they said.

Ramos had no wallet or other identification on him at the time of his arrest, according to charging documents filed against him. Officials said Ramos was identified in part by the use of a facial-recognition system after he was in custody.

President Trump addressed the shooting Friday, calling it a “horrific, horrible thing” that “shocked the conscience of our nation and filled our hearts with grief.”

“Journalists, like all Americans, should be free from the fear of being violently attacked while doing their job,” Trump said.

The president has previously called the news media “the enemy of the American people.” He has also repeatedly referred to the media as “Fake News” and has also called the media “the opposition party in many ways.”