Suspect was investigated before rampage
Man sent barrage of threatening tweets to paper
A police report released Friday says the man accused of killing five people at a Maryland newspaper was investigated five years ago for menacing tweets, but a detective concluded he was no threat.
ANNAPOLIS, Md. — The man accused of killing five people at a Maryland newspaper was investigated five years ago for a barrage of menacing tweets against the daily, but a detective concluded he was no threat, and the paper didn’t want to press charges for fear of inflaming the situation, according to a police report released Friday.
The newspaper was afraid of “putting a stick in a beehive.”
The 2013 police report added to the picture emerging of 38-year-old Jarrod W. Ramos as the former information-technology employee with a longtime grudge against The Capital of Annapolis was charged with five counts of first-degree murder in one of the deadliest attacks on journalists in U.S. history.
Authorities said that Ramos barricaded the rear exit of the office to prevent anyone from escaping and methodically blasted his way through the newsroom Thursday afternoon with a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun, cutting down one victim trying to slip out the back.
Three editors, a reporter and a sales assistant were killed.
“The fellow was there to kill as many people as he could,” Anne Arundel County Police Chief Timothy Altomare said.
Ramos was denied bail after a brief morning court appearance in which he took part by video, watching attentively but saying nothing.
Authorities said he was “uncooperative” with interrogators. He was placed on a suicide watch in jail. His public defenders had no comment outside court.
The first-degree murder charges carry a maximum penalty of life without parole. Maryland has no death penalty.
The bloodshed initially stirred fears that the recent surge of political attacks on the “fake news media” had exploded into violence. But by all accounts, Ramos had a specific, longstanding grievance against the paper.
At the White House, President Donald Trump, who routinely calls reporters “liars” and “enemies of the people,” said: “Journalists, like all Americans, should be free from the fear of being violently attacked while doing their jobs.”
Ramos had filed a defamation suit against the paper in 2012 after it ran an article about him pleading guilty to harassing a woman. The lawsuit was later thrown out by a judge as groundless. And Ramos had repeatedly targeted staff members with angry, profanity-laced tweets.
“There’s clearly a history there,” the police chief said.
Ramos launched so many social media attacks that retired publisher Tom Marquardt said he told his wife in 2013: “This guy could really hurt us.”
Altomare disclosed Friday that a detective investigated those concerns that year, holding a conference call with an attorney for the publishing company, a former correspondent and the paper’s publisher.
The police report said the attorney produced a trove of tweets in which Ramos “makes mention of blood in the water, journalist hell, hit man, open season, glad there won’t be murderous rampage, murder career.”
The detective, Michael Praley, said in the report that he “did not believe that Mr. Ramos was a threat to employees” at the paper, noting that Ramos hadn’t tried to enter the building and hadn’t sent “direct, threatening correspondence.”
“As of this writing the Capital will not pursue any charges,” Praley wrote. “It was described as putting a stick in a beehive which the Capital Newspaper representatives do not wish to do.”
Later, in 2015, Ramos tweeted that he would like to see the paper stop publishing, but “it would be nicer” to see two of its journalists “cease breathing.”
The online grudge apparently “went dark” for a period until some new posts just before the killings, Altomare said.