The suspected gunman who killed five in a Maryland newsroom Thursday—modifying his fingers to avoid being identified—has been identified as a federal employee who had a “long-running feud” with The Capital Gazette. According to The Baltimore Sun, which shares a parent company with the Capital, the mass murder suspect, Jarrod Ramos, of Laurel, Maryland, sued the newspaper for defamation, over their coverage of his guilty plea in a criminal harassment case.
In 2012, Ramos filed a defamation lawsuit against the paper and a columnist over a July 2011 story that covered a criminal harassment case against him.
He brought the suit against the columnist, Eric Hartley, naming Capital Gazette Communications and Thomas Marquardt, the paper’s former editor and publisher, as defendants.
Ramos, 38,
represented himself in the lawsuit, which was
summarily and unapologetically dismissed in September 2013.
A lawyer would almost certainly have told him not to proceed with this case. It reveals a fundamental failure to understand what defamation law is and, more particularly, what defamation law is not. The appellant is aggrieved because the newspaper story about his guilty plea assumed that he was guilty and that the guilty plea was, therefore, properly accepted. 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.
The appellant was charged with a criminal act. The appellant perpetrated a criminal act. The appellant plead guilty to having perpetrated a criminal act. The appellant was punished for his criminal act. He is not entitled to equal sympathy with his victim and may not blithely dismiss her as a "bipolar drunkard." He does not appear to have learned his lesson.
Ramos, then 31, pled guilty to criminal harassment, had no previous criminal record at the time he was charged, and got off easy with 18 months of supervised probation, therapy, and no-contact with his victim or her loved ones.
Five days later, according to the unreported opinion, the Capitol Gazette’s Eric Hartley wrote about the case, in an article entitled “Jarrod wants to be your friend.”
'I just thought I was being friendly,' she said.
That sparked months of emails in which Ramos alternately asked for help, called her vulgar names and told her to kill herself. He emailed her company and tried to get her fired.
She stopped writing back and told him to stop, but he continued. 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.
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. They never met until they came to court a couple of months ago.
Last week, Ramos, a 31-year-old federal employee, pleaded guilty in District Court to a misdemeanor harassment charge.
The Baltimore Sun also reports that Ramos maintained a Twitter account that appears to have foretold the tragedy.
The account had been dormant since January 2016. Then at 2:37 p.m. Thursday — moments before the Capital shooting — the account posted a message that read: “F--- you, leave me alone.”
The Daily Beast spoke with one of the paper’s attorneys, who confirmed that Ramos and his Twitter account were on their radar.
Zak Shirley who represented the Capital Gazette in the defamation case, said Ramos 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.”
Authorities insist the attack was aimed at the Capital Gazette, not the media writ large.
“This was a targeted attack on the Capital Gazette,” said Anne Arundel County Deputy Police Chief William Krampf. “This person was prepared today to come in. He was prepared to shoot people.”
Police said a shotgun was used in the incident. They said officers did not exchange gunfire with the suspect, who was now being interrogated. They said officers had recovered “smoke grenades” used by the suspect in the building.
The names of the deceased have been released.
Here are their obituaries, created by the staff of The Baltimore Sun. Take some time to get to know them. I will be.
Gerald Fischman
Rob Hiaasen
John McNamara
Rebecca Smith
Wendi Winters