Details emerge in Md. newsroom shooting
ANNAPOLIS, MD. — A man with a vendetta against a Maryland newspaper fired a shotgun through the newsroom’s glass doors and at its employees, killing five and injuring two others Thursday in a targeted shooting, according to police.
The attack appears to be the deadliest involving journalists in the United States in decades.
Local police said the
Capital Gazette was targeted in the incident that prompted heightened security in newsrooms around the country.
A bulletin emailed to Maryland law enforcement officials identified the shooting suspect as Jarrod Ramos, 38. Police were searching an apartment in Laurel, late Thursday that is tied to Ramos.
Ramos in 2015 lost a defamation case he brought against the paper over a 2011 column he contended defamed him. The column provided an account of Ramos’ guilty plea to criminal harassment of a woman over social media.
Police, who arrived at the scene within a minute of the reported gunfire, apprehended a single gunman found hiding under a desk in the newsroom, according to the top official in Anne Arundel County, where the attack occurred.
The suspected gunman was not cooperating with police investigators. He carried canisters with smoke grenades that he used inside the building, police said.
“This person was prepared today to come in, this person was prepared to shoot people,” Anne Arundel County Deputy Police Chief William Krampf said. “His intent was to cause harm.”
Victims identified
Police said all of the victims killed were Capital Gazette employees: Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen, John McNamara, Rebecca Smith and Wendi Winters. Fischman and Hiaasen were editors, McNamara was a reporter, Smith was a sales assistant and Winters worked for special publications, according to the newspaper’s website.
The motive of the gunman remained unclear, but police said the newsroom had recently received threats of violence through social media.
“There is nothing more terrifying than hearing multiple people get shot while you’re under your desk and then hear the gunman reload,” Gazette reporter Phil Davis said on Twitter.
Davis described the scene as a “war zone” and a situation that would be “hard to describe for a while,” in a news story posted to the daily newspaper’s website within 45 minutes of the shooting.
Police swarmed the area about four miles west of Maryland’s statehouse to clear the scene and evacuate more than 170 occupants of the office building to a nearby mall.
“It appears to be the act of a lone shooter,” Anne Arundel County Executive Steve Schuh said. “It does not appear to be a particularly well-planned operation.”
The Laurel chief of police, Richard McLaughlin, said the building where Ramos is believed to live had been evacuated Thursday night.
The apartment is in a cluster of three-story brick buildings off Route 1 in Prince George’s County, about 35 minutes from the Capital Gazette office.
Police from Laurel and Anne Arundel County and federal officials are on the scene.
The Capital Gazette, Annapolis’s daily paper, is widely read in Maryland’s capital and in surrounding Anne Arundel County, where it is headquartered.
“Devastated & heartbroken. Numb,” Gazette editor Jimmy DeButts said on Twitter. “Please stop asking for information/ interviews. I’m in no position to speak, just know @ capgaznews reporters & editors give all they have every day. There are no 40 hour weeks, no big paydays - just a passion for telling stories from our community.”
Ramos has worked at the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, according to a lawyer who represented him in 2011, but it could not be confirmed Thursday if he still worked there.