Newsroom in mourning
Shooting suspect charged with murder; paper prints as usual.
ANNAPOLIS, Md. — A man with a long grudge against Maryland’s capital-city newspaper was charged Friday with five counts of first-degree murder after police said he blasted his way into the newsroom with a pump-action shotgun, killing five people in one of the deadliest attacks on journalists in U.S. history.
Jarrod W. Ramos, 38, was swiftly arrested as he tried to hide under a desk Thursday afternoon at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, police said.
Before the sun rose Friday morning, copies of the Capital Gazette arrived on newsstands and in front yards across Annapolis, where res- idents said their hometown paper means “everything” to them.
“5 shot dead at The Capital,” read the headline on the article written by 10 journalists on the day five of their colleagues were killed.
A Wawa convenience store less than a mile from the office complex where the shooting occurred sold out of the newspaper just after 6 a.m.
At the top of the front page were pictures and names of those killed: Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen, John McNamara, Rebecca Smith and Wendi Winters.
“Today, we are speechless,” the newspaper wrote on its editorial page, which was left nearly blank to “commemorate victims of Thursday’s shootings at our office.”
Then it listed the five names, beginning with Fischman, who remained listed at the top of the page as part of the Gazette’s editorial board.
Authorities on Friday said the gunman had barricaded the rear exit before the shooting to prevent anyone from escaping, cutting down one victim trying to slip out the back.
“The fellow was there to kill as many people as he could,” Anne Arundel County Police Chief Timothy Altomare said.
Ramos, a former information-technology worker for the federal government, had a long-held grudge against the Capital Gazette. He filed a defamation lawsuit against the paper in 2012 after it ran an article about him pleading guilty to harassing a woman — the lawsuit was thrown out by a judge as groundless — and he repeatedly targeted staff members with menacing, profanity-laced tweets.
Police looked into the online threats in 2013, but the newspaper declined at the time to press charges for fear that doing so “would exacerbate an already flammable situation,” Altomare said. Also, the detective who investigated the case did not believe Ramos was a threat, according to a police report.
“There’s clearly a history there,” the police chief said.
The first-degree murder charges carry a maximum penalty of life without parole. Maryland has no death penalty.
At the White House, President Donald Trump said: “Journalists, like all Americans, should be free from the fear of being violently attacked while doing their jobs.”
Ramos was identified with the help of facial recognition technology because of what the chief said was some kind of “lag” in getting results from the computer system used to analyze fingerprints. Police denied news reports that Ramos had mutilated his fingertips to thwart his identification.
Two officials told The Associated Press on Thursday night, based on preliminary information, that the gunman had damaged his fingerprints in what was believed to be an effort to make it harder to identify him. That information had been in a law enforcement document and was included in a briefing that one of the officials received.
The chief said the weapon was a 12-gauge shotgun, legally purchased about a year ago despite Ramos having plead guilty in the harassment case. He also carried smoke grenades, authorities said.
Ramos launched so many social media attacks about the newspaper and its writers that retired publisher Tom Marquardt said he called police in 2013, telling his wife at the time, “This guy could really hurt us.”
A police report on the 2013 investigation said a Capital Gazette attorney showed an officer tweets from Ramos in which Ramos “makes mention of blood in the water, journalist hell, hit man, open season, glad there won’t be murderous rampage, murder career.”
The officer, Michael Praley, said in the report that he “did not believe that Mr. Ramos was a threat to employees” at the paper, noting that Ramos hadn’t tried to enter the building and hadn’t sent “direct, threatening correspondence.”
Later, in 2015, Ramos tweeted that he would like to see the paper stop publishing, but “it would be nicer” to see two of its journalists “cease breathing.”
The online grudge apparently “went dark” for a period until some new posts just before the killings, Altomare said. The chief said police were not aware of Ramos’ recent online activity until after the rampage, saying: “Should we have been? In a perfect world, sure, we should have been.”
Investigators were reviewing Ramos’ social media postings and searched his apartment, where Altomare said they found evidence of the planning Ramos had put into the attack. The chief would not give details.
The city of Annapolis announced a vigil for the victims Friday night at a public square near the Capitol.