Suspect’s threats spoke volumes
Legal system grapples with words vs. actions
He left a years-long trail of harassment, threats and contemptuous behavior. There were dozens of warning signs that he might turn violent – including repeated threats of killing a journalist.
Although none of that was seemingly taken very seriously by authorities, Jarrod Ramos’ words and online activity offer examples that in hindsight could have prompted a stronger response from his employers, police and the court system. Ramos is now charged with killing five people at a Maryland newspaper last week.
USA TODAY reviewed thousands of pages of court records and interviewed dozens of people who knew or interacted with Ramos to build this profile. It shows an angry man who became obsessed with the people he felt wronged him, from a former high school classmate and her lawyer to the judges he appeared before and the journalists who exposed his campaign of harassment.
Experts say the attack at the Capital Gazette highlights the challenges of trying to balance the rights of people to speak freely against concerns that they could turn violent. In a court filing, Ramos said he had seen five mental health professionals for at least 75 visits before last week’s shooting.
“You can’t lock someone up because
you have an inner fear about what he might do,” said Richard Barajas, executive director of the National Organization for Victim Assistance and former chief judge of the Texas Court of Appeals. “The criminal justice system is not designed for it. And the mental health system is ill-equipped to do it.”
Despite his pattern of threats, Ramos never offered any hint he would actually act on them. He had been engaged in a lengthy fight with the Capital Gazette over its coverage of a court case in 2011 that he pleaded guilty to harassing a former classmate. In one court filing, Ramos said he wanted to kill journalist Eric Hartley but phrased it in a specific way: “If not illegal, (I) would kill the living body of Hartley.”
Still, his behavior was enough to strike fear in attorney Brennan McCarthy, who represented the high school classmate Ramos pleaded guilty to harassing.
McCarthy chillingly warned in a court filing: “There exists a very real possibility that at some point in time, Mr. Ramos will take these violent fetishes as expressed in print, and will try to carry them out in person.”
Kill ‘every person present’
Ramos’ extensive court filings provide a window into his contemptuous attitude toward the legal system. After a judge sentenced him to counseling and probation for stalking his former classmate online, Ramos tried to have the woman prosecuted for perjury, suggested the judge should be disbarred and then unsuccessfully sued the journalist and newspaper. He criticized one court clerk for being sloppy because her mother was ill and suggested another made mistakes because she was thirsty.
Ramos, who has been charged with five counts of first-degree murder, titled sections of his court filings “Murder of the spirit” and “blood on their hands,” and he acknowledged he told his former classmate to “have another drink and go hang yourself, you cowardly little lush.” He emailed her boss to say she was a “bipolar drunkard leading a double life.” He then insisted he was “not a wantonly abusive person” and hadn’t hurt anyone since he was a child.
The initial Capital Gazette article about Ramos in 2011 highlighted the dangers posed by online relationships, which then were still a relatively new phenomenon. Experts say that today, Ramos’ actions might have been taken more seriously.
“It’s possible that the courts may have taken a different approach had they realized the level of threat,” said Victor Fornari, a psychiatrist at Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, New York. “On the other hand, are we accustomed to putting people in custody for what they say? Usually not. We’re innocent until proven guilty. There’s a real tension between free will, free speech and public safety.”
On Monday, it was revealed that Ramos sent letters the day of the shooting – to the newspaper’s former attorney, a courthouse in Baltimore, the Maryland Court of Special Appeals and a law office – announcing his intentions to kill “every person present.”
On Twitter, Ramos regularly attacked the Capital Gazette, its journalists, editors and the judge who presided over the case. He centered many of his threats on the former reporter who wrote about his harassment conviction, Eric Thomas Hartley, and the retired publisher, Tom Marquardt.
Ramos almost regularly posted comments on how he wanted members of the staff to kill themselves and his hopes that the newspaper would shut down. He repeatedly included the hashtag #CapDeathWatch.
In a post in September 2014, Ramos mentioned a shotgun, saying “My bullets are words.” Police say Ramos used a shotgun in the shooting.
Marquardt contacted police and considered getting a restraining order. Police investigated but could not conclude Ramos would act on his threats. Since last week’s shooting, police have not commented on his past behavior or their interactions with him, citing the murder case against Ramos.
In a court filing in 2014, attorney McCarthy alerted the court to Ramos’ Twitter postings and noted the threats had escalated over time. McCarthy also warned the court to never let Ramos be alone with a female worker.
“Of the thousands of people I’ve dealt with in court, this guy stuck,” he said. “I was extremely scared that he was going to do something to me and my family.”
When words matter
Police look closely at the language used in threats when deciding whether to act. Supreme Court scrutiny has helped establish what a “true threat” entails, a carve-out from First Amendment-protected speech, said Sarah Duggin, a law professor at the Catholic University of America.
“The line for charging ordinarily is if there’s a threat, was there intent to threaten on the part of the caller, not what a reasonable person would think,” Duggin said. “The ‘true threat’ exception in Virginia vs. Black established there’s no First Amendment protection for speech meant to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence.”
Barajas, the former judge, said society has changed in the years since Ramos first began harassing his former classmate.
“Years ago, we would have ignored it or simply blown it off,” Barajas said. “We never looked at them as dangerous, only because we no had reason to think they were dangerous.
“But then it becomes a question of: What do you do with them? Our court systems are not created to deal with things like this, these innuendoes.”