Capital Gazette shooting

Jarrod Warren Ramos (born December 21, 1979) was captured by police and taken into custody as a suspect, but refused to identify himself.

Early reports said that the gunman mutilated his fingertips to avoid identification, but a law-enforcement official later stated that an issue with the fingerprint machine had caused the difficulties in identifying the suspect, and that his fingertips had not been mutilated.

The suspect was also carrying a backpack with smoke bombs, flashbang devices, and grenades.

The police later announced that the attack had been targeted specifically at Capital Gazette Communications.

In a court filing, Ramos stated he had seen five mental health professionals for at least 75 visits before the shooting, and exhibited a pattern of threats.

Many of those around Ramos believed him to be a calculated, manipulative loner, who would become angry when things did not go his way, with those afflicted by him convinced he would one day hurt someone.

None of Ramos's immediate family responded to requests for comment and other relatives have stated that they have not had contact with him for several years.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Capital Gazette shooting was one of two incidents in which multiple journalists were killed in the United States since the organization began compiling data in 1992.

The Capital had published an article in 2011 about Ramos being put on probation for harassing an acquaintance from high school through social media and email.

Ramos, angered by the article, brought a defamation lawsuit against the newspaper but a judge later dismissed the suit.

Ramos is alleged to have sent enraged letters and messages to The Capital threatening to attack its newsroom and staff, but no legal action was taken after the threats were received.

Capital Gazette Communications, owned by Tribune Publishing through its subsidiary the Baltimore Sun Media Group, publishes the daily newspapers The Capital and the Maryland Gazette and the weekly Crofton-West County Gazette.

At the time of the shooting, its offices were located at 888 Bestgate Road in Parole, an unincorporated area of Anne Arundel County just outside Annapolis.

Around 2:34 pm (EDT), the Anne Arundel County Police Department reported that a shooting began, resulting in five fatalities and the wounding of several other victims.

Before the shooting, the gunman had barricaded the rear exit of the office to prevent people from escaping.

Sources reported that the weapon was a "long gun" which would later be identified as a 12-gauge Mossberg 500 pump-action shotgun.

Police later said that the long gun had been purchased legally some time within the eighteen months prior to the shooting.

The gunman used the weapon to fire repeatedly after shooting out the office's glass door.

Phil Davis, a courts and crime reporter at the site of the shooting for The Capital, tweeted that the gunman "shot through the glass door to the office and opened fire on multiple employees".

Davis also described the newspapers' offices as a "war zone" after the shooting and described hearing the gunman reload.

He said the male gunman was alone.

During a pause in the shooting, survivors moved to take refuge between filing cabinets; Wendi Winters confronted the gunman, causing the pause.

Winters charged the gunman with a trash can and recycling bin, screaming at him, distracting him long enough for survivors to escape before she was shot.

Several injured victims were sent to the Anne Arundel Medical Center for treatment.

County police evacuated 170 people from the building to a reunification center set up at the nearby Westfield Annapolis shopping center.

The police reportedly had a one-minute response time, and interviewed survivors in the criminal investigations unit of the Anne Arundel County Police Department.

The police discovered the suspect underneath a desk in the office, and surveillance within the office documented the incident and helped identify Ramos as the perpetrator.

Former Capital editor and publisher Thomas Marquardt said Ramos began harassing the staff of the newspaper after the article on him was published in 2011.

In 2012, Ramos sued The Capital in a defamation case he brought over a 2011 newspaper article reporting on his guilty plea for criminal harassment.

The other incident was the murders of Alison Parker and Adam Ward during a live television interview in 2015.

After multiple appeals from Ramos, the defamation case against the newspaper was dismissed in 2015 by Prince George's County circuit court judge Maureen M. Lamasney, who ruled in favor of the paper because their reporting was based on publicly available records and Ramos had produced no evidence that the article was inaccurate.

Lamasney wrote in her court opinion that Ramos's complaint was "a fundamental failure to understand what defamation law is, and more particularly, what defamation law is not".

On June 28, 2018, a mass shooting occurred at the offices of The Capital, a newspaper serving Annapolis, Maryland, United States.

The gunman, Jarrod Ramos, killed five employees with a shotgun and injured two others who were trying to escape.

Ramos was arrested shortly thereafter.

He pleaded guilty but not criminally responsible to 23 charges; in July 2021, a jury found him criminally responsible.

It is the deadliest mass shooting in Maryland history.

An indictment was handed up on July 20, 2018, included five counts of first-degree murder, one count of attempted first-degree murder, six counts of first-degree assault, and 11 counts of the use of a firearm in the commission of a felony.

Five people were killed and two others were injured in the attack.

Those killed were: