The suspected shooter at the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis, Maryland Thursday had been flagged to police as “the next mass shooter” by a woman he reportedly stalked. Jarrod Warren Ramos also had a vendetta against the Capital Gazette for publishing an article about the harassment case.
The woman, a former high school classmate of Ramos’, had reportedly been stalked by Ramos — and his harassment of her had been the subject of a 2011 article in The Capital, headlined, “Jarrod wants to be your friend.”
Videos by PopCulture.com
She told WBAL-TV 11 that she warned a former police official years ago that Ramos “will be your next mass shooter.” She added, “He’s a f—ing nut job.”
After an unsuccessful defamation lawsuit filed against The Capital, as well as years of threatening the newspaper and its staff on social media, the 38-year-old man opened fire in the newsroom Thursday afternoon, killing five and injuring two in what police are calling a “targeted attack.”
Ramos’ initial stalking of his former classmate started with a Facebook message of thanks for being “the only person ever to say hello or be nice to him in school” and escalated into a harassment campaign which forced her to change her name and leave the state.
She told WBAL-TV that she moved three times and now sleeps with a gun.
The 2011 Capital Gazette article was published after Ramos pleaded guilty to criminal harassment and described how Ramos had sent the woman numerous emails over the course of several months, calling her vulgar names and telling her to kill herself.
The article, published in its entirety in the harassment lawsuit, also detailed that he contacted the woman’s job; she was suspended by a supervisor the same month and then was let go several months later, which she believes was due to Ramos.
“When she blocked him from seeing her Facebook page, he found things she wrote on other people’s pages and taunted her with it, attaching screenshots of the postings to some of his emails,” The Capital reported in 2011. “She called police, and for months he stopped. But then he started again, nastier than ever. All this without having seen her in person since high school.”
Two years after the article was published, Ramos sued the paper, the reporter who initially wrote about his case, a judge and the woman who testified against him. His defamation suit was thrown out on appeal in 2015 because Ramos failed to prove that what the newspaper had printed was untrue.
Following the failed lawsuit, Ramos would routinely harass journalists from the Capital Gazette on Twitter in dozens of profanity-laced posts. He used a Twitter account with the handle @EricHartleyFrnd, the name of one of the paper’s former reporters, Eric Thomas Hartley, who now works at a newspaper in Norfolk, Virginia.
One of Ramos’ threatening tweets targeted one of the journalists killed on Thursday, Rob Hiaasen. Another tweet discussed how he’d enjoy seeing the paper stop publishing, but that “it would be nicer” to see two of its journalists “cease breathing.”
He did not use the Twitter page for more than two years until just minutes before the shooting. “F— you, leave me alone,” the tweet reads.
The Twitter account has since been suspended.
The shooting occurred before 3 p.m. ET. Crime reporter Phil Davis compared the scene to a “war zone” in an interview with the Baltimore Sun, which owns The Capital.
Ramos allegedly used a shotgun in the attack and was found hiding beneath a desk by police. He was also carrying grenades or flash-bang grenades, police say. He was uncooperative when taken into custody. He was not carrying identification and had reportedly damaged his fingertips to avoid being identified by authorities, CBS News reports. Police and investigators used facial recognition software to compare his face to driver’s license photos to identify him.
Police identified the victims as Wendy Winters, Rebecca Smith, Robert Hiaasen, Gerald Fishman and John McNamara. Winters was the special publications editor, McNamara was a writer, Fischman was editorial page editor, Smith was a sales assistant and Hiaasen was an assistant editor and columnist.
Tom Marquardt, the paper’s retired publisher and top editor, told the Capital Gazette Thursday that he had been concerned about Ramos’ history of escalating social media threats against the paper and its journalists. He said he called police about him in 2013 and considered filing a restraining order against him.
“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.”
Davis said the lone gunman shot through the glass door of the offices and opened fire on the employees.
“A single shooter shot multiple people at my office, some of whom are dead,” he tweeted.
“There is nothing more terrifying than hearing multiple people get shot while you’re under your desk and then hear the gunman reload,” he wrote.
