Police: Gunman worked methodically.
ANNAPOLIS, MD. >> The man accused of killing five Capital Gazette staff members had threatened the newspaper in 2013 and continued to pepper social media with dark and often profane warnings. But until Thursday, the attacks had been only words.
That changed when Jarrod Ramos blasted out the glass doors of the newsroom near Annapolis at 2:40 p.m. and unleashed his rampage, police said, shooting with a legally purchased 12-gauge pumpaction shotgun until he finally laid it down and hid under a desk as police arrived.
Anne Arundel County State’s Attorney Wes Adams said Ramos’ actions, including barricading a back door so that people could not escape and his “tactical approach of hunting down and shooting the innocent victims,” was evidence of a “coordinated attack.”
On Friday, a judge ordered that Ramos, 38, remain in custody and be held without bond on five counts of murder as Ramos appeared via a video feed from a detention center. At the bond hearing, Adams called Ramos an “overwhelming threat and danger to our community.”
The threats in 2013 came amid a lawsuit Ramos filed accusing the paper of defaming him through a column describing his pleading guilty to harassing a woman over social media. The defamation case was dismissed.
Ramos’ obsession with a former Arundel High School classmate, which started with his making contact on Facebook in late 2009 or early 2010, caused at least two criminal charges and three peace orders to be lodged against him and probably cost him his job with the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the summer of 2014.
The Capital Gazette and its lawyer had reported threats made in May 2013 and spoke with a detective who investigated. The newspaper decided not to pursue criminal charges because it might “exacerbate” the situation, Anne Arundel County Police Chief Timothy Altomare said Friday during a news conference.
Until 2016, when courts rejected a last round of his many appeals, Ramos pursued his claim that he had been wronged by the paper. And he took to Twitter to call out the people he insisted had wronged him.
Over a four-year span, from late 2011 to early 2016, Ramos waged a social media campaign against the Capital Gazette. He tweeted at the newspaper’s official account, @capgaznews, 149 times. He mentioned the name of the columnist — Eric Hartley — 101 times, and a dozen times named Thomas Marquardt, the paper’s former editor.
“I’ll enjoy seeing @capgaznews cease publication, but it would be nicer to see Hartley and Marquardt cease breathing,” he posted on Feb. 2, 2015.
He also repeatedly referred to the 2015 Charlie Hebdo shooting in Paris, where al-Qaida-affiliated gunmen killed 12 people and injured 11 others at the offices of the French satirical newspaper.
Explaining Friday to a judge why Ramos should remain in custody, Adams said Ramos worked his way through the newsroom, shooting victims along the way. “There was one victim that attempted to escape through the back door but was shot,” he told the judge. Ramos also used smoke grenades, police said.
Four journalists and a sales associate for the Capital Gazette were killed.