Murder trial awaits newsroom gunman
FIVE KILLED BY SHOOTER IN USA
A MAN with a long grudge against a newspaper in Maryland has been ordered held in jail on five counts of first-degree murder after police said he blasted his way into the newsroom with a shotgun, killing five people.
Jarrod Warren Ramos, 38, was swiftly arrested as he tried to hide under a desk on Thursday afternoon at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, police said.
“The fellow was there to kill as many people as he could,” Anne Arundel County chief Timothy Altomare said.
The attack on The Capital Gazette in Annapolis came amid months of verbal and online attacks on the “fake news media” from politicians. Ramos had a well-documented history of harassing the paper’s journalists, a feud that apparently began over a column about him pleading guilty to harassing a woman.
He filed a defamation suit against the paper in 2012 that was thrown out and often railed against its staff in profanity-laced tweets. Journalists crawled under desks and sought other hiding places as he moved about the newsroom, describing agonising minutes of terror as they heard the gunman’s footsteps and the repeated blasts of the shotgun.