A journalist who survived the Maryland newspaper shooting said they need a lot more than ‘thoughts and prayers’ as she and her colleagues deal with the aftermath of Thursday’s horrific attack.
Selene San Felice, a staff writer at Capital Gazette, was on Anderson Cooper 360 Thursday night, hours after gunman Jarrod W. Ramos stormed into the newspaper’s Annapolis office and opened fire.
Five people were killed in the shooting, and two more injured.
Felice said she had heard that president Donald Trump offered his prayers to those affected by the shooting, but said more needs to be done.
‘We need more than prayers. I appreciate the prayers. I was praying the entire time I was under that desk,’ she told Anderson Cooper getting emotional. ‘I want your prayers, but I want something else.’
Selene San Felice and her coworker Phil Davis said they need more than prayers. Felice and Davis are both survivors of Thursday’s shooting at Maryland’s Capital Gazette
‘Thanks for your prayers but I couldn’t give a f**k about them’: Felice and Davis told Anderson Cooper on his show Thursday that people need to do more than offer their ‘thoughts and prayers’
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
Felice went on to describe how she hid underneath her desk and texted her parents that she loved them as Ramos fired at her coworkers. She said she remembers covering the Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida and hearing about survivors doing the same thing.
‘I don’t know what I want right now but I’m gonna need more than a couple days of news coverage and thoughts and prayers,’ she said, getting emotional.
‘Our whole lives have changed. Thanks for your prayers but I couldn’t give a f**k about them if there’s nothing else.’
Jarrod W. Ramos, 38, is the gunman who shot dead five people and injured two others at Maryland’s Capital Gazette newsroom on Thursday. He is pictured in a 2013 mugshot
Felice’s coworker, Phil Davis, said he agreed that as a society we need to offer more than prayers.
‘I was praying when he started re-loading that shotgun that there weren’t going to be more bodies. And you know what if we’re at a position in our society where all we can offer each other is prayers, then where are we? Where are we as a society?’ he said.
Police said Rams, 38, was armed with a shotgun and smoke grenades when he launched the attack on the journalists in their newsroom.
He was arrested shortly after police stormed the building. There is no known motive at this stage but police said it was a ‘targeted attack’ on the Capital Gazette and that he 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.
Winters was the special publications editor, McNamara was a writer, Fischman was editorial page editor, Smith was a sales assistant and Hiaasen was an assistant editor and columnist.
Police said the newspaper had received threats on social media prior to the deadly shooting. Investigators said they were trying to determine if the threats were linked to the suspect.
Five people were killed Thursday afternoon and two more injured when a gunman opened fire inside the Annapolis newsroom
Police said it was a ‘targeted attack’ and Ramos had a grudge against the paper over a 2011 article they published about him and his case
Ramos had unsuccessfully sued the newspaper and one of its former reporters in 2013 for defamation. A Twitter profile under his name includes frequent tweets about the newspaper and its staff.
Ramos was the subject of a 2011 article – titled ‘Jarrod wants to be your friend’ – after he pleaded guilty to criminal harassment. The article described him as having threatened and harassed a former high school classmate on Facebook. He sent the woman numerous emails spanning several months calling her vulgar names and telling her to kill herself.
In the years that followed, Ramos sued the newspaper, the reporter who initially wrote about the case, a judge and the woman who testified against him. His defamation suit was thrown out on appeal in 2015 because Ramos failed to prove that what the newspaper had printed was untrue.
Ramos routinely harassed journalists from the newspaper on Twitter in scores of profanity laced tweets. One of those tweets targeted one of the journalists killed on Thursday, Rob Hiaasen. In another tweet, he discussed how he’d enjoy seeing the paper stop publishing, but ‘it would be nicer’ to see two journalists ‘cease breathing.’