Man charged with murder over deadliest attack on US newsroom
ANNAPOLIS (Maryland): A Maryland man was charged with multiple counts of murder yesterday, a day after police say he rampaged through a newsroom here with a shotgun and killed five people in one of the deadliest attacks on journalists in United States history.
Jarrod Ramos, 38, from Laurel, about 40km west of here, faces five counts of first-degree murder in Anne Arundel County criminal court, the Capital Gazette newspaper group reported.
Authorities had not released the identity of the suspect, but online court records showed a man by the same name was charged with five counts of murder. Ramos had a long-standing grudge against the newspaper, and unsuccessfully sued for defamation in 2012, court records showed.
Ramos is accused of entering the Capital Gazette office on Thursday afternoon and opening fire through a glass door, hunting for victims and spraying the newsroom with gunfire as reporters hid under their desks and begged for help on social media, police and witnesses said.
Rob Hiaasen, 59, Wendi Winters, 65, Rebecca Smith, 34, Gerald Fischman, 61, and John McNamara, 56, were shot and killed. All were journalists except for Smith, who was a sales assistant, said William Krampf, acting chief of the Anne Arundel County Police Department.
The Capital newspaper published an edition yesterday with photographs of each of the victims and a headline “5 shot dead at The Capital” on its front page.
Ramos brought a defamation suit in 2012 against Eric Hartley, a former staff writer and columnist with Capital Gazette, and Thomas Marquardt, then editor and publisher, a court filing showed.
An article by Hartley had contended that Ramos had harassed a woman on Facebook and that he had pleaded guilty to criminal harassment, according to a legal document.
The court agreed the article was accurate and based on public records, the document showed. In 2015, Maryland’s second highest court upheld the ruling, rejecting Ramos’s suit.
Ramos tweeted at the time that he had set up a Twitter account to defend himself, and wrote in his biographical notes that he was suing people in Anne Arundel County and “making corpses of corrupt careers and corporate entities”.