Capital Gazette shooting suspect charged with 5 counts of murder; court hearing Friday
WASHINGTON — A Laurel, Maryland, man with a long-running dispute with the Capital Gazette has been charged with five counts of first-degree murder in the deadly shooting Thursday at the Annapolis newspaper.
The Anne Arundel County police confirmed Friday morning that Jarrod W. Ramos, 38, is the suspect. He has been charged with five counts of first-degree murder. A bond review hearing is scheduled for Friday morning in District Court in Annapolis.
Friday morning, in a brief news conference, the Anne Arundel County police said Ramos would be in court on murder charges. Lt. Ryan Frashure said the suspect was “not very cooperative.”
In a news conference Thursday night, Acting Anne Arundel County Police Chief William Krampf called the shooting “a targeted attack on the Capital Gazette,” but did not say whether the man was targeting specific people.
Krampf said the gunman “looked for his victims as he walked through the lower level” and set off smoke grenades in the building.
Ramos’ apartment building was searched in the overnight hours of Thursday into Friday.
Two people suffered minor injuries
According to court records, in 2012 Ramos filed a defamation lawsuit in Prince George’s County against the Capital Gazette, a reporter, and editor over a July 2011 article about Ramos entering a guilty plea to a harassment charge.
The lawsuit was thrown out, but Ramos appealed the case to Maryland’s Court of Special Appeals, and Court of Appeals. In each case, the courts ruled against Ramos.On Thursday, shortly before the shooting, the account posted a message addressed to Moylan: “F— you, leave me alone.”
Tom Marquardt, a retired publisher and top editor at the paper who was named as a defendant in Ramos’ lawsuit, told The Capital Gazette on Thursday that he had long been concerned about Ramos’ history of escalating social media attacks against the newspaper and its journalists.
“I was seriously concerned he would threaten us with physical violence,” Marquardt said. “I even told my wife, ‘We have to be concerned. This guy could really hurt us.’”
In the Court of Special Appeals, Judge Charles Moylan wrote about Ramos, “He is aggrieved because the story was sympathetic toward the harassment victim and was not equally understanding of the harassment perpetrator. The appellant wanted equal coverage of his side of the story. He wanted a chance to put the victim in a bad light, in order to justify and explain why he did what he did. That, however, is not the function of defamation law.”
Overnight, a Twitter account with Ramos’ name on it had been suspended.
By Friday, friends and co-workers of the five victims — Rob Hiaasen, Rebecca Smith, Gerald Fischman, John McNamara and Wendi Winters — were describing their devotion to journalism.
According to the Baltimore Sun, which owns the Capital Gazette, a GoFundMe page has been established to attempt to raise $70,000 to assist the Capital Gazette newsroom and its journalists.
The Associated Press and WTOP’s Teta Alim and Jack Moore contributed to this report.
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