Gunman’s harassing posts raise questions about policing web
Md. attacker tweeted against paper for years
The police knew about his threats. The newspaper he assailed considered him a danger. And in public tweets, the man suspected of killing five at a Maryland newspaper this week broadcast his hate with a stream of invective.
The failure to stop Jarrod Ramos, charged with five counts of first-degree murder for Thursday’s deadly rampage at the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, shows the blind spots that foil law enforcement and internet companies – even as the social media gusher puts the warning signs in plain sight.
“The terror and violence that we saw at Capital Gazette is another horrible example why our laws need to be updated to reflect modern-day crime,” said Rep. Katherine Clark, D-Mass., who has been pushing for years to bolster federal online harassment laws and increase cyber training for police departments around the country.
Ramos, 38, posted harassing social media messages that alarmed editors at the paper and led police to investigate but fell short of leading authorities to pursue charges or Twitter to ban him. Twitter suspended Ramos’ account Friday but declined to comment on that.
Ramos’ grudge with the Capital Gazette dated back to a July 2011 article chronicling his guilty plea for harassing a former high school classmate by email, phone and Facebook.
A year later Ramos filed a defamation lawsuit against the paper in a Maryland state court and later added a charge of invasion of privacy over the newspaper’s coverage of his conviction.
The lawsuit was eventually dismissed, but that did not stop Ramos from launching a Twitter campaign in which he unleashed vitriol against the paper and its staff, including threats against the former staff reporter who wrote about his harassment conviction, Eric Thomas Hartley, and retired publisher Tom Marquardt.
In one haunting February 2015 tweet, Ramos’ account said, “I’ll enjoy seeing @capgaznews cease publication, but it would be nicer to see Hartley and Marquardt cease breathing.”
Ramos’ Twitter account featured journalist Hartley’s picture as its avatar and included the tagline “making corpses of corrupt careers.” On Hartley’s forehead was photoshopped a symbol from the Japanese manga and anime series “Berserk,” which recounts the ritual murder of people marked with it. Ramos also photoshopped the symbol on Marquardt’s head.
Since Nov. 20, 2011, Ramos mentioned in tweets @ethartley or his last name 107 times, Marquardt by name or as “Evil Tom” nearly 100 times, and @capgaznews more than 50 times, according to a USA TODAY analysis.
The account regularly attacked the newspaper and its journalists, including a reference to the deadly shooting at the French paper Charlie Hebdo in 2015.
It had been dormant since January 2016. Shortly before the shooting Thursday, it posted a message: “F--- you, leave me alone.” That was the same message it posted the day after the state’s second-highest court upheld a ruling in favor of the newspaper.
Marquardt told the Capital Gazette that he called Anne Arundel County Police years ago to express his concerns about Ramos’ attacks on the paper and its journalists on social media.
“I was seriously concerned he would threaten us with physical violence,” Marquardt said. “I even told my wife, ‘We have to be concerned. This guy could really hurt us.’ ”
Anne Arundel County Police Chief Timothy Altomare said a detective was assigned to investigate the matter in May 2013, but the paper ultimately declined to pursue criminal charges.
“There was a fear that doing so would exacerbate an already flammable situation,” Altomare said.
Some law enforcement experts questioned whether Ramos’ online posts crossed a legal threshold that would have allowed police to file charges.
“The question is: Are his statements credible threats? In retrospect, it’s easy to say yes. But we have a lot of crazy people in this world saying things,” said Peter Scharf, co-founder of the Gulf Coast Computer Forensics Laboratory and a criminologist at Louisiana State University.
“You now have people saying, ‘Police should be patrolling the internet,’ ” Scharf said. “But really what’s here that would trigger a rational law enforcement intervention?”