Latest reports from Laurel police department suggest that Jarrod W. Ramos, 38, is being held as the suspect in the attack on Capital Gazette. The deadly shooting happened on Thursday, and according to court records that are accessible online, Ramos has been charged with five counts of first-degree murder. A bail review hearing is set for Friday at 10:30 a.m. in Annapolis and at the moment, there is no attorney listed for the shooter.
Both police and federal agents were involved in the investigation, and Rich McLaughlin, chief of the Laurel police department, stated that Laurel law enforcement members were part of the investigation in the shooting.
While the motive for Capital Gazette attack isn’t confirmed we did get the info that Ramos had a long-running feud with them. In 2011 article about a harassment charge against Ramos was published and in 2012 he decided to file a defamation lawsuit against both journalist and paper. The lawsuit was filed against Eric Hartley who wrote the article, and Thomas Marquardt who was publisher and editor. Both of these men are no longer with Capital Gazette.
Ramos went so far and created a Twitter page that had Hartley as avatar while Marquardt and Philip Merrill were on banner image. The bio of the page says: “Dear reader: I created this page to defend myself. Now I’m suing the s— out of half of AA County and making corpses of corrupt careers and corporate entities.”
Unfortunately, Marquardt already warned about the possibility that something like this could happen as Ramos threatened him and other employees of the paper. “I was seriously concerned he would threaten us with physical violence,” Marquardt said from his retirement home in Florida. “I even told my wife, ‘We have to be concerned. This guy could really hurt us.’ ”
It will shock you I’m sure to learn that one reason the shooter targeted the Capital Gazette is because they reported on his stalking and harassing a woman: https://t.co/4l9SOvV0Ju
— Jill Filipovic (@JillFilipovic) June 29, 2018
Marquardt also added that he informed Anne Arundel County police in 2013 regarding the threats, but nothing happened. “I remember telling our attorneys, ‘This is a guy who is going to come in and shoot us,’ ” he added.
We also contacted Ramos’ aunt Vielka Ramos, 59, and she couldn’t believe that he would do such a thing. She talked about his childhood and that everything was just fine with him growing up in Severn saying that “He was very intelligent. He would try to communicate with people but he was a loner.”
The column that was written by Hartley centered around online relationship and harassment of Ramos when he contacted one of his high school classmates. According to the article, Ramos sent a friend request to the woman and this, later on, turned into a true nightmare for her. This case went to court, and he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor harassment charge, and everything was characterized as “rather bizarre” by the judge.
Defamation suit against Capital Gazette was finally concluded in 2015 after the state’s second-highest court confirmed the previous ruling and dismissed the case.
Source: baltimoresun.com
