New perspective on gunman’s life emerges
Shooter’s sister testifies on his family, social history
She took one look at the defense table and cried.
At the very end sat a masked, maned and bearded man in a jail jumpsuit. It was her brother, who she hadn’t seen in at least six years.
Since then, he had blasted into the newsroom of the Capital Gazette and killed Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen, John McNamara, Rebecca Smith and Wendi Winters. He’s served three years at the county jail, pleaded guilty to all his crimes and is standing trial to determine whether he was sane during the attack.
Besides documents and his own account to psychiatrists, Michelle Jeans’ testimony could be the only look jurors get of Jarrod Ramos’ upbringing and personal life. She already shared her story with police, prosecutors, defense attorneys and three sets of forensic psychiatrists. Thursday, she told it to the jury tasked with deciding if her brother will spend the rest of his life in prison or be committed to a psychiatric hospital.
Jeans said the psychiatrists asked her about Ramos’ family and social history. The doctors use such contextual information in considering different diagnoses. It also helps form their opinion of whether the person was suffering during the crime from a mental illness that prevented them from understanding their actions were illegal or being able to stop themselves from following the law.
Her testimony Thursday described how Ramos, although introverted, devolved from a relatively normal child into a man obsessed on one line in a newspaper story written about him. Over the years that Ramos waged a legal battle against the Capital Gazette, his sister found he could talk of little else — until he stopped talking to her at all.
State’s Attorney Anne Colt Leitess was quick to highlight apparent inconsistencies
between what she said on the witness stand and what she’d told police in a pair of interviews roughly three years ago. Cross examination is expected to continue Friday morning.
Two and a half years younger than Ramos, the siblings grew up together in Odenton with their mother, the homemaker, and father, who worked for the U.S. Department of Defense, Jeans said. They moved to an American military base in England, where Ramos enjoyed playing video games with other children, and returned to Anne Arundel County.
They both went to Arundel High School. Ramos would drive her to school but retreat to his room when they got home. She said her emotionally distant father was proud of Ramos for excelling in school — he was
always intelligent — and that Ramos went from loving his mom to having nothing to do with her.
He eventually joined a running team and a chess club, but didn’t come away with meaningful relationships by the time he graduated in 1997.
“I don’t remember him having a social life at all,” Jeans said. “There were never any friends over or going out.”
After hiking the Appalachian Trail to process his grandmother’s death, Ramos returned to his family’s home where only his mother remained following a divorce. He paid separate utilities for his bedroom. But when his mother was getting ready to sell the house and disconnected his internet, he perceived it as a personal attack.
He cut off ties with his mother in 2004 and moved in with Jeans.
“When people upset him,” Jeans said, “he disowned them and removed them from his life.”
Jeans testified Ramos developed his own principles of right and wrong, a personal code that Jeans said helped land him in trouble with a woman who accused him of harassing her. He felt he had to send derogatory messages to her employer. In his mind, he was helping her straighten her life out, Jeans said.
That led to a criminal harassment charge, which led to a newspaper column about the case. Ramos wrote to a lawyer that although the story was “largely a valid report” of his court hearing, he believed one line was inaccurate: “‘Expletive you, leave me alone’ though she hadn’t written to him in months.”
“He was devastated . .. . It felt like to him a personal attack against him,” Jeans said.
Ramos demanded a retraction and an apology. When it didn’t come, he sued the Capital Gazette, its attorney, the woman he harassed and her lawyer, even a therapist’s office he accused of giving information to his harassment victim, according to prosecutors.
Around that time, Ramos created a new Twitter account. Jeans said his posts began as bizarre but she was concerned he was starting to cross a line. She talked to him about it, and he started distancing himself from her, she testified.
The last time they spoke was around the beginning of 2015, when Court of Special Appeals Judge Charles E. Moylan Jr. rejected what would be Ramos’ final appeal.
After work on June 28, 2018, Jeans saw the news about what her brother had done. She checked his Twitter and found his final Tweet: “F*** you, leave me alone @ judgemoylanfrnd.” Jeans immediately called the police.
Sitting down with a detective, she remembered something Ramos told her about his tweets. In court Thursday, Leitess read what Jeans told police.
“I would say ‘Jarrod that’s f—-ed up.’ He said ‘I want them to think I’m crazy.’ ”