Benefit concert performed for slain newsroom workers

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — The five Capital Gazette employees killed in an attack in their newsroom last month were “friends of the people,” and “not one of them deserved to be seen as an enemy,” the executive editor of The Washington Post said Saturday at a benefit concert for the victims’ families and colleagues.

Martin Baron spoke of all five of the victims by name, and he described them as “friends of the people, the people of Annapolis and beyond.”

“Not one of them deserved to be seen as an enemy because of the profession they choose or the place they worked,” Baron said to applause from the audience. “Not one of them deserved to be seen as an enemy by the man who killed them, and not one of them deserved to be called an enemy by anyone else, either: Nor does anyone else in our field deserve to be labeled that way.”

Baron added: “To demean people like these, to demonize, to dehumanize them, is to debase yourself.”

The day after the shooting, President Donald Trump said journalists shouldn’t fear being violently attacked while doing their job.

The benefit concert was held a month after the June 28 shooting, which was one of the deadliest attacks on journalists in U.S. history.

Olivier Knox, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, told the audience the nearly 400 members of the organization stood behind the Capital Gazette.

Knox also saluted first responders, who also were being honored by the concert. Knox said some reporters also run toward danger and face threats.

The suspect, Jarrod Ramos, had a history of harassing the Capital Gazette’s journalists.

He filed a defamation suit against the paper in 2012 that was dismissed as groundless, and he repeatedly targeted the paper’s staff members in profanity-laced tweets.

A grand jury indicted Ramos on 23 counts, including murder, attempted murder and assault in the deaths of Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen, John McNamara, Rebecca Ann Smith and Wendi Winters.

Maryland-bred rockers Good Charlotte headlined the concert Saturday evening.

Brian Witte The Associated Press Winters Geimer, the daughter of slain journalist Wendi Winters, attends a benefit concert Saturday in Annapolis, Md.