Rampage turned quiet newsroom into chaos
ANNAPOLIS: When the first shot went off, shattering the glass doors to the newspaper office, people at their desks struggled to grasp what was happening.
Anthony Messenger, a sports intern, thought the popping sound might be fireworks. He couldn’t see anyone.
Then came more blasts, one after the next. He and another reporter, Selene San Felice, raced to the newsroom’s back door that was always unlocked. This time, it was jammed shut.
The pair crept beneath a desk as far from the front door as they could and waited.
They huddled together — silent but urgently texting a parent, sending a tweet (“Active shooter 888 Bestgate please help us”) and calling 911, but never speaking for fear of being heard.
“It was insane,” Messenger, who had worked at the Capital Gazette for four weeks, recalled on Friday on the Today show.
“In that moment, I thought I was going to die.”
Thursday had begun as an ordinary day in the Capital Gazette’s first-floor office. Calls were being made and stories filed, as one television monitor played national cable news and another showed how many people were reading the Capital Gazette’s website.
Just after 2:33pm, a gunman’s rampage turned the often quiet newsroom into chaos.
The entire chain of events — from the first crashing of the glass doors to the removal of a suspect by the authorities — lasted only minutes, but left five newspaper employees dead.
To get inside the newsroom, workers used key cards or got buzzed through the glass doors. But after the gunshots shattered the glass, employees who sat closest to the doors were hit first.
The Capital Gazette’s looks like many other newsrooms around the country — a wide open layout and waist-high dividers separating clusters of L-shaped desks, covered in a sometimes untidy mix of old newspapers, pads of paper and more.
“You can see from the front of the office to the back,” said Joshua McKerrow, a photographer.
Those who sat near the back of the newsroom scrambled to the floor, hoping to go unnoticed beneath their desks. The gunman, said Phil Davis, a crime reporter who was among those to hide under a desk, was silent.
Authorities said the gunman made his way from the front of the room to the back. Prosecutors said he had barricaded the rear door, apparently to prevent workers from fleeing through the only other exit.
One of the people who was shot, authorities said, had tried to escape through that back door — the one Messenger had been unable to open earlier.
As quickly as 60 seconds after the shots began, law enforcement authorities arrived.
Reporters and other workers began emerging from under desks, hands up and shouting: “We’re not him.”
Employees filed out of the newsroom, hands still up, having to pass the bodies of co-workers to get out the front door.
“The office, it was kind of in shambles,” Messenger said.
“We tried to keep our eyes off of the ground,” he said, adding later: “It was sickening.”
Davis, the crime reporter, said that he was the last to leave the office. Police found the gunman hiding under a desk.
He was calling out to the police: “He surrenders. He surrenders.”