Annapolis Shooting Suspect Blamed Paper for Reporting on His Stalking

Jarrod Ramos had been threatening the Capital Gazette since it reported on his vicious harassment of a woman in 2011. 

by Kelly Weill and Will Sommer

The suspected killer in a mass shooting at Annapolis, Maryland’s Capital Gazette newspaper, 38-year-old Jarrod Ramos, had previously waged a years-long campaign against the paper through social media and the court system after the newspaper reported in 2011 on his guilty plea in a vicious harassment case.

Ramos filed a defamation suit against the newspaper, but had his case and his appeal tossed by judges. But he continued to rail against the Capital Gazette for years, including on Twitter—where his profile picture was a crude photoshop of a sacrificial symbol onto the head of the journalist who wrote the Capital Gazette story about him.

On Thursday afternoon, Ramos allegedly entered the Capital Gazette newsroom with smoke grenades and a shotgun. He is accused of opening fire on the room, killing five people, and wounding several more. He was taken into custody alive.

Zak Shirley, a lawyer who represented the Capital Gazette in the defamation case, said Ramos—whom law-enforcement officials identified as a suspect to the Associated Press Thursday night, hours after the attack—regularly made threats on his Twitter account. Shirley told The Daily Beast that people involved in the case were “absolutely” concerned about violence.

“We were concerned about him at the time, it definitely came up more than once,” Shirley said. “And it was because of his Twitter feed.”

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Source: The Daily Beast