HE LAID A DEATH TRAP FOR JOURNOS
Fiend barred exit in newsroom rampage: cops
The Capital Gazette killer blasted his way into the newspaper’s newsroom with a legally bought shotgun — and barricaded the back door so employees couldn’t escape, officials said Friday.
With his targets trapped inside, Jarrod Ramos, 38, began “systematically hunting and killing” the victims with the 12-gauge, pumpaction shotgun during his rampage at the Annapolis, Md., building on Thursday, authorities said.
“The fellow was there to o kill as many people as he could kill,” Anne Arundel County Police Chief Timothy Altomare said.
It was part of a plan. In- vestigators searched the former government IT worker’s apartment in nearby Laurel and found evidence showing “the origination of planning,” Altomare said. No manifesto was found at the apartment, where he has lived for the past 17 years, but cops had not yet recovered all of the files from his electronics, tronics the police chief added. Ramos Ram (left), meanwhile, was charged charg with five counts of first-degree murder Friday for the deaths de of Capital Gazette employees emplo Rob Hiaasen, 59, Wendi Winters, 65, Gerald Fischman, chma 61, John McNamara, 56, and an Rebecca Smith, 34. He appeared in an Annapolis court via video link, listening silently as
the judge denied him bail.
“There is a certain likelihood you are a danger,” Judge Thomas Pryal told him, according to The Baltimore Sun.
Altomare said Ramos had not been cooperative with police.
Ramos had harbored a longstanding grudge against the Capital Gazette, which publishes several local papers, after it published a story about his 2011 charge for criminally harassing a female high-school classmate.
In 2012, he sued the company for defamation, but a judge tossed his suit. An appeals court upheld the decision in 2015, saying Ramos “fails to come close to alleging a case of defamation.”
He then began an online harassment campaign against the newsroom.
Thomas Marquardt, the Capital Gazette’s editor and publisher at the time, said on Friday that he showed staffers photos of Ramos and told them to call 911 if they ever saw him.
“Everyone knew what he looked like,” Marquardt, who stepped down in 2012, told The Wall Street Journal. “We took it very seriously.”
Marquardt said Ramos was the most threatening person he had ever dealt with in his career.
“Some people have said the threats were veiled, but it was pretty clear to us working there at the time,” he told the Journal. “They weren’t vague to me at all. I felt threatened the whole time.”
Police investigated the threats in 2013 and spoke with the Capital Gazette’s lawyers, but they agreed not to pursue criminal charges out of concern that it could antagonize Ramos more.
“There was a fear that doing so would exacerbate an already flammable situation,” Altomare said on Friday as he defended the decision.
“Every day, we talk to somebody who decides they don’t want to press charges. In Maryland, if it’s a felony, we push; if it’s a misdemeanor, a lot of mis- demeanors go the way of not charging,” the police chief said.
“I don’t feel that the department was negligent in any way.”
But an anonymous woman told a Baltimore NBC affiliate that Ramos stalked and harassed her years ago — and that she had warned police that “he will be your next mass shooter.”
“He’s a f- -king nut job,” the woman told WBAL 11 News.
If convicted, Ramos faces life without parole.
Are New York lawmakers reading all the details of the shooting attack on the Capital Gazette, which left five people dead? Because if ever a case argued for the passage of a so-called “red flag” bill to remove guns from dangerous people — this is it.
Despite overwhelming public support, legislators packed up and went home this session without passing such a bill. Instead, they played politics and finger-pointing games with Gov. Cuomo.
The legislation, backed by all five city district attorneys, would let family members, law-enforcement officials and others ask a judge to keep firearms away from someone who shows “clear and convincing” evidence he’d harm himself or others.
By that reasonable standard, Jarrod Ramos would never have been allowed to buy and keep the 12-gauge pump-action shotgun he allegedly used to open fire in the Gazette newsroom.
Ramos had been a long-standing public menace: The paper’s staff was warned to call 911 if they saw him in the vicinity after he launched a years-long vendetta against the Gazette.
“I was seriously concerned he would threaten us with physical violence,” said the Gazette’s former editor and publisher. “I remember telling our attorneys, ‘ This is a guy who is going to come in and shoot us.’ ”
Also feeling threatened was a former highschool classmate on whom Ramos reportedly became fixated — so threatened, in fact, that she was forced to move three times, change her name and sleep with a gun under her bed.
It’s a cinch that a judge would’ve agreed Ramos qualified under a “red flag” law as a public threat. And something similar can certainly happen in New York.
Yet, thanks to Albany, this state has no redflag law, even as polls show public support for one at 89 percent. Senate Republicans were leery of a bill Cuomo introduced at the last minute to replace a more narrow one that likely would have passed.
How sad. When it comes to the issues of gun violence and mental illness, New Yorkers hear lots of heated rhetoric — but get precious little substantive action.