The Maryland newsroom gunman said nothing in court today as prosecutors revealed he’d barricaded shut the main escape route before the mass shooting – and gunned down victims as they tried to escape.
Jarrod Ramos, 38, who is charged with five counts of first-degree murder, sat in silence during his ten minute hearing, via video link, at the Anne Arundel District Court in Maryland Friday.
Judge Thomas J. Pryal ordered the suspect, who had long dark hair and wore a dark shirt, to be held without bond because he posed a danger to others.
Wes Adams, a prosecutor for Anne Arundel County, had told the judge that Ramos had carried out a ‘coordinated attack’ to ensure maximum casualties.
Before he burst into the newsroom, Ramos had sneaked round the back of the Capital Gazette building and barricaded the backdoor – closing off a potential escape route for his victims.
Jarrod W. Ramos is pictured in a police booking photo taken by police on Thursday after his arrest, left, and in his jail booking shot, right. He sat in silence during his ten minute hearing today at Anne Arundel District Court
Wes Adams, a prosecutor for Anne Arundel County, had told the judge that Ramos had carried out a ‘coordinated attack’ to ensure maximum casualties
The 38-year-old, who also had a backpack full of smoke bombs, then walked round to the front entrance and opened fire, shattering the glass front door. Schuh said he then deployed one of the smoke bombs, masking his entrance and adding to the fear and confusion of staff.
Most of the staff were at their desks and editors were in their offices when Jarrod, armed with a shotgun, entered the open office and began shooting.
‘He was going down our newsroom, starting from the front and just continually shooting people,’ crime reporter Phil Davis said.
Adams said Ramos ‘hunted’ down his targets in a brutal series of attacks on innocent victims.
Police responded within 60 seconds to reports of an active shooter at the newsroom in the 800 block of Bestgate Road, Annapolis, at around 2.40pm on Thursday
Police and the media respond to the tragic shooting at the Capital Gazette newsroom yesterday
Jarrod W. Ramos was arrested shortly after police stormed the building on Thursday afternoon. He is pictured above being led away by police in handcuffs
Phil Davis, a court and crime reporter for the Gazette, confirmed that multiple people had been shot
‘We brought to the judge’s attention the evidence that suggested a coordinated attack: The barricading of a back door and the use of a tactical approach in hunting down and shooting the innocent victims in this case,’ he told reporters.
While some hid from the intruder under their desks, another reporter, Selene San Felice, said that she, two staffers and an intern ran for the back door – only to find it had been blocked by Ramos. Unable to escape, she told CNN that she hid under a desk with the intern, while another colleague sheltered behind a filing cabinet.
Reporter John McNamara, however, refused to give up and kept trying to open the door. He was gunned down and killed trying to escape.
‘I’m not sure exactly in the next couple seconds what happened, but I know that John was standing up,’ San Felice said. ‘I heard the footsteps, and John got shot. It was very close. I saw him get shot, but I didn’t see the gunman or anything.’
Adams confirmed that one of the victims, ‘who attempted to escape through the back door and was shot at that point.’
Ramos, who will return to court for his preliminary hearing shortly, made his first court appearance in the early hours of Friday morning, at 1.30am, in front of a court commissioner where he was read his rights.
Adams (left) said Ramos ‘hunted’ down his targets in a brutal series of attacks on innocent victims. At a separate press conference this morning (right), Anne Arundel County Police Chief Timothy Altomare said that Ramos ‘was there to kill as many people as he could kill’
Lynne Griffin pays her respects at a makeshift memorial near the Capital Gazette. Griffin was a journalism student under John McNamara who was one of the people killed at the paper
A woman delivers flowers at a memorial set up on behalf of the shooting victims at The Capital newspaper, on Bestgate Road, near the office of The Capital newspaper in Annapolis
However, he refused to cooperate and so they couldn’t proceed with the hearing, according to a WUSA9 reporter.
At a separate press conference this morning, Anne Arundel County Police Chief Timothy Altomare said that Ramos ‘was there to kill as many people as he could kill’.
Police said Ramos used a pump-action shotgun which ‘was legally purchased a year or so ago.’
Altomare confirmed that police had identified Ramos, a former Bureau of Labor Statistics IT contractor until 2014, using facial recognition software ‘and a couple of other techniques to make sure we knew who the bad guy was.’
But he refused to say Ramos’ name during the presser, saying: ‘I will not say his name today. I refuse to do it. I wish you wouldn’t do it. But I know better. He doesn’t deserve us to talk about him one more second.’
The mass shooting occurred after years of threats and abuse following the 2011 Capital Gazette article about Ramos harassment of a former classmate, headlined ‘Jarrod wants to be your friend’, and was published after he pleaded guilty to criminal harassment.
Capital Gazette staff contacted the police about gunman Jarrod W. Ramos after he made death threats against the editor and a journalist – but he was never arrested
Killer and creep: Ramos’ stalking of his ex-classmate begun with a Facebook message and escalated into harassment which saw her forced to change her name and leave the state
In the years that followed the publication of the article, Ramos sued the newspaper, the reporter who initially wrote about the case, a judge and the woman who testified against him.
Ramos, 38, even posted death threats on social media against the newspaper’s editor, Tom Marquardt, and another reporter, as part of his years-long harassment campaign against the newspaper.
‘I said during that time, ‘This guy is crazy enough to come in and blow us all away,’ Marquardt told the LA Times.
Despite evidence of the death threats online, police failed to arrest the gunman.
Charged: Jarrod W. Ramos, pictured in a 2013 mugshot, has been charged with five counts of first-degree murder
‘We contacted police … and they went out to talk to him,’ said Marquardt, who added that Ramos had personally wished him dead on social media. ‘They reviewed all the tweets so far and again came away with the feeling that there really wasn’t enough substance there to pursue a case in court.’
On Friday, Police Chief Timothy Altomare was asked why Ramos wasn’t picked up soon if police were aware he was potentially dangerous.
‘We were aware of him,’ he told The Today Show, adding that even the death threats weren’t enough for police to make an arrest. This is the greatest free society on earth. Conduct had to cross certain lines for us to intervene.’
Ramos’ defamation suit was thrown out on appeal in 2015 because Ramos failed to prove that what the newspaper had printed was untrue.
Ramos would go on to routinely harass journalists from the Capital Gazette on Twitter in scores of profanity laced posts.
One of Ramos’ tweets targeted one of the journalists killed on Thursday, Rob Hiaasen.
Ramo, who lives in Laurel, Maryland, was arrested shortly after police stormed the building and had initially refused to identify himself to authorities in the aftermath of the shooting.
Police called the shooting a ‘targeted attack’ on the Capital Gazette, said Ramos had entered the building ‘looking for his victims’.
The five victims were named by police as Wendi Winters, 65, Rebecca Smith, 34, Robert Hiaasen, 59, Gerald Fischman, 61, and John McNamara, 56.
Ramos was reportedly under a desk when police found him after storming the building.
Authorities said they recovered a shotgun from the scene, as well as what they thought to be an explosive device. Police said the device ‘was taken care of’ but didn’t elaborate.
The Capital Gazette photojournalist Joshua McKerrow, center, worked with colleagues in a parking garage of a mall in Annapolis, Md., during coverage of the fatal shootings that happened in their paper’s newsroom earlier in the day
Reporter Pat Furgurson embraces a Capital Gazette colleague outside their office building on Thursday afternoon
Even though a number of the colleagues were casualties in the shooting, staff at the Capital Gazette provided rolling coverage and firsthand accounts of the tragedy throughout the evening, publishing a newspaper the next day.
Journalists described crawling under desks to hide in what they said was minutes of terror as they heard the gunman’s footsteps and the repeated blasts of the shotgun as he moved about the newsroom.
Phil Davis, a court and crime reporter for the Gazette, said the lone gunman shot through the glass door of the offices and then opened fire on the newspaper employees.
‘A single shooter shot multiple people at my office, some of whom are dead,’ he tweeted, while he said he was waiting to be interviewed by police.
‘Gunman shot through the glass door to the office and opened fire on multiple employees. Can’t say much more and don’t want to declare anyone dead, but it’s bad.
‘There is nothing more terrifying than hearing multiple people get shot while you’re under your desk and then hear the gunman reload.
Describing the moment as like being in ‘a war zone’, Davis said he and his colleagues were hiding under their desks, listening to the gunman firing and reloading until there was sudden silence.
‘I don’t know why he stopped,’ he said.
The newspaper still put out a print edition on Friday. They tweeted out an image (above) of their front page late on Thursday night regarding the deaths of their five colleagues
Jimmy DeButts, the editor of the newspaper’s website, tweeted in the hours after the shooting that he was ‘devastated, heartbroken and numb’.
Another reporter Chase Cook, who wasn’t inside the building at the time, tweeted that while they didn’t have much information right now: ‘I can tell you this: We are putting out a damn paper tomorrow.’
Police spokesman Lt. Ryan Frashure said officers raced to the scene, arriving in 60 seconds, and took the gunman into custody without an exchange of gunfire.
About 170 people in all were evacuated from the building as a multitude of police cars and other emergency vehicles converged on the scene. People could be seen leaving the building with their hands up.
The shooting, which came amid months of verbal and online attacks on the ‘fake news media’ from politicians and others from President Donald Trump on down, prompted New York City police to immediately tighten security at news organizations in the nation’s media capital.
New York police sent counterterrorism teams to news organizations around the city in a move authorities said was a precaution, not prompted by any specific threat. Police could be seen outside The New York Times, ABC News and Fox News early in the evening.