Editor Had Feared Suspect As 'Crazy Enough' To 'Blow Us All Away'

ANNAPOLIS, MD — The first tangible event that spiraled into the mass shooting Thursday at The Capital Gazette newspaper outside of Annapolis came on July 31, 2011, when the paper published a story about Jarrod Ramos, now in custody for opening fire in the paper's newsroom, killing five people.

The story, by Eric Thomas Hartley, a staff writer and columnist, detailed how Ramos had used social media and email in a year-long barrage of threats against a former classmate that were so chilling she feared for her life. Her attorney says that even though she has moved out of state, and with Ramos now in jail, his client still fears the accused mass shooter.

Attorney Brennan McCarthy of Annapolis, who represented the woman Ramos stalked for years, moved out of Maryland because she was afraid for her life. The harassment and stalking began in 2009 after the woman friended her former classmate on Facebook. In 2011 she filed a harassment charge against Ramos, he pleaded guilty, and was given 18 months probation.

“He was as angry an individual as I’ve ever seen,“ McCarthy told CBS News. “She lost her job because of this individual. He’s malevolent. He forwarded a letter to her employer basically stating that she was bipolar and a drunkard, which is ridiculous.”

The Capital then reported on the conflict, with the headline “Jarrod Wants To Be Your Friend.”

“Mr. Ramos was obsessively angry about this particular story,” McCarthy said.

McCarthy said when he heard about Thursday’s shooting at the paper, he knew the gunman was Ramos.

“He did it. It was inevitable. He was going to do something violent, the only question was who would he get first,” McCarthy said.

In 2012 Ramos sued The Capital for defamation, but the case was dismissed on appeal in 2015 when a judge ruled nothing in the newspaper story was false. After the story was published, the paper's editor, Thomas Marquardt, would begin fearing for his own life and for the safety of his staff.

Ramos had admitted to the threats against his classmate, pleading guilty in Maryland Circuit Court to criminal harassment. He claimed, though, that The Capital's article about the case was defamatory, and he quickly switched targets, aiming at the paper's reporter and editors in incendiary letters and online posts.

He created a Twitter page that featured a picture of Hartley. He posted stories about violence against other reporters, including the 2015 attack at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris that left 12 people dead and the shooting of two Virginia television journalists killed on live television later that year.

In 2012, Ramos tweeted a picture of Marquardt with Sen. Barbara Mikulski.

"Stay away from him @senbarb," Ramos wrote. "He's DOOM. I watched you at the gates of Journalistic Hell. Don't believe me? Check a map."

In a 2015 post, Ramos wrote: “I’ll enjoy seeing @capgaznews cease publication, but it would be nicer to see Hartley and Marquardt cease breathing.”

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Marquardt acknowledged Thursday that he feared Ramos, but not because of the defamation claim. A judge dismissed the lawsuit after Ramos failed to name one factual error in The Capital's story. His appeal to overturn the ruling was rejected soon after.

“He waged a one-person attack on anything he could muster in court against the Capital,” Marquardt, the newspaper’s editor and publisher until 2012, told the Los Angeles Times following the shooting.

That was nothing, though, compared to the persistent, wild intensity Ramos maintained for years.

“I said during that time, ‘This guy is crazy enough to come in and blow us all away,’” Marquardt recalled, adding that he and other newspaper officials had fretted over how to stop Ramos’ harassment.

Police couldn’t arrest Ramos for his behavior toward the newspaper, and the paper was reluctant to sue him in court. “The theory back then was, ‘Let’s not infuriate him more than I have to.… The more you agitate this guy, the worse it’s gonna get.’”

In a separate interview with the Virginian-Pilot, Marquardt said police didn't believe they had a case.

"I felt personally threatened by the guy," Marquardt said. "I was worried about my well-being, my wife's well-being, and the staff's. We were all concerned at the time."

Details related to the harassment conviction indicate that Ramos had serious emotional and social issues long before Hartley's article appeared in The Capital.

The harassment of his schoolmate bean in 2009 or 2010, when he located her on Facebook and messaged his thanks to her for being the only person ever to say hello or be nice to him at Arundel High School, which they attended together more than a decade earlier.

He was having troubles, Ramos told her, so she wrote back, trying to help. She suggested counseling.

From there, Ramos went on a year-long email barrage, alternately pleading for her help, peppering her vulgar names and urging her to kill herself. He emailed her employer and tried to get her fired. When she notified police, he stopped contacting her for a few months but then resumed with emails nastier than ever.

Those actions, included in The Capital article, were acknowledged by Ramos as part of his guilty plea.

Judge Jonas D. Legum initially sentenced him to 90 days, but then suspended the jail time and placed him on probation. At the time, Ramos was a federal employee with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

On July 23, 2012, a year after the story was published, Ramos sued Hartley; the paper's editor, Marquardt; and Capital Gazette Communications, LLC, the paper’s owner.

“Article contains defamatory statements of and concerning Jarrod W. Ramos ('Plaintiff'), which were read and recognized to be defamatory by third persons, injuring Plaintiff's reputation and exposing him to public scorn, hatred, contempt, and ridicule,” the suit claimed. "These defamatory statements were and continue to be false... As a direct result, Plaintiff has suffered harm and continues to incur harm."

The reporter and the other defendants filed court papers arguing the lawsuit was baseless and asked the court to dismiss it. On March 29, Judge Maureen M. Lamasney held a hearing on their request.

When she asked Ramos to identify a single false statement in the article, he could not.

"It all came from a public record,” the judge told Ramos. “It was of the result of a criminal conviction. And it cannot give rise to a defamation suit.”

She dismissed the lawsuit.

When he tried to overturn the ruling, the opinion upholding Judge Lamasney’s decision was harsh.

"The appellant [Ramos] was charged with a criminal act," Judge Charles E. Moylan wrote in the opinion rejecting the appeal. " 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."

Marquardt, The Capital's former editor, recalled Thursday to the Times how powerless he felt against Ramos even as the court threw out the legal claims.

“If it’s him, I’m gonna feel ... responsible for this,” Marquart said. “I pray it’s not him.”

Photo: Jarod W. Ramos from Anne Arundel County Police Department