‘We are putting out a damn paper tomorrow’
From the moment gunfire rang out at the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis journalists there began covering their own tragedy.
An intern at the Maryland paper tweeted at 2.43pm Thursday, local time, that there was an active shooter in the building.
‘‘Please help us,’’ Anthony Messenger wrote.
Staff members who were not in the newsroom rushed towards the building, not yet knowing that five of their colleagues had been killed. And once they got the news, they continued to seek information on what led to the deaths of their co-workers and friends.
From outside, Capital photographer Joshua McKerrow took photos of the massive police presence that enveloped the building, which also houses more than two dozen other tenants.
‘‘Police response for shooting in my newsroom,’’ he posted as a photo caption on Twitter.
And reporter Phil Davis – once he was evacuated from the newsroom – provided the most detailed account of the massacre he witnessed. His words would end up weaved into an article on his newspaper’s website, a place his name typically only appears as a byline.
Davis described the gunman shooting through the glass door of the office before opening fire on multiple employees.
‘‘There is nothing more terrifying than hearing multiple people get shot while you’re under your desk and then hear the gunman reload,’’ he tweeted.
Davis is a police reporter. He said in an interview that while he writes about shootings and death ‘‘all the time,’’ it’s impossible to know how traumatising it is go through such a tragedy ‘‘until you’re there.’’
Hours after the shooting, Capital reporters promised to continue covering their story.
‘‘I can tell you this,’’ reporter Chase Cook tweeted. ‘‘We are putting out a damn paper tomorrow.’’
Police said the suspect was a white man in his late 30s whose rampage followed social media threats directed at the newspaper. Authorities said the man entered the building in a targeted attack and ‘‘looked for his victims.’’ He threw smoke grenades and fired a shotgun at his victims, according to Anne Arundel County Acting Police Chief William Krampf.
‘‘This person was prepared today to come in, this person was prepared to shoot people. His intent was to cause harm,’’ Krampf said.
Krampf declined to identify the suspect but said he was a Maryland resident and search warrants were being sought for his home.
The attacker had mutilated his fingers in an apparent attempt to make it harder to identify him, according to a law enforcement official who was not authorised to discuss the investigation and spoke on condition of anonymity. Another official who also spoke on condition of anonymity said investigators identified the man using facial recognition technology.
The shooting – which came amid months of verbal and online attacks on the ‘‘fake news media’’ from politicians and others from President Donald Trump on down – prompted New York City police to immediately tighten security at news organisations in the nation’s media capital. – TNS, AP