‘He’ll be the next mass shooter’: Newsroom gunman who killed five had stalked ex-classmate, got her fired and forced her to move state then began vendetta against the newspaper that exposed him
Five people are dead after a gunman opened fire Maryland’s Capital Gazette newsroom on Thursday
Jarrod W. Ramos, 38, was arrested at the scene and has now been charged with five counts of murder
Ramos had been convicted of harassing a former high school classmate, which the paper had written about
She has now revealed that she warned police five years ago that he would be ‘the next mass shooter’
Police say newspaper had received threats on social media prior to the deadly shooting
Ramos had unsuccessfully sued the newspaper and one of its former reporters in 2013 for defamation
The five victims are: Wendi Winters, Rebecca Smith, Robert Hiaasen, Gerald Fischman and John McNamara
By SARA MALM
DAILYMAIL.COM
29 June 2018
The gunman who murdered five people at a newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, had been flagged up to police as ‘the next mass shooter’ by a woman he obsessively stalked – and had a vendetta against the publication because they exposed his perverted campaign of harassment.
Jarrod W. Ramos’ harassment of the woman, one of his former high school classmates, had been the subject of a 2011 article in the Capital Gazette, which would later see him sue the newspaper.
After the unsuccessful lawsuit, and years of posting threats against the newspaper and its staff on social media, the 38-year-old opened fire in their newsroom on Thursday afternoon, killing five and injuring two.
Ramos’ initial stalking of his former classmate had begun with a Facebook message of thanks for being ‘the only person ever to say hello or be nice to him in school’, and escalated into a harassment campaign which saw her forced to change her name and leave the state.
The woman told a WBAL TV reporter that she had become so frightened of Ramos that she had to move three times and now sleeps with a gun, adding that he is a ‘f***ing nut job’.
The 2011 Capital Gazette article about Ramos harassment of the woman was headlined ‘Jarrod wants to be your friend’, and was published after he pleaded guilty to criminal harassment.
The article, quoted in its entirity in the 2013 defamation lawsuit, described how Ramos had sent the woman numerous emails spanning several months, calling her vulgar names and telling her to kill herself.
The Capital reported that he also contacted the woman’s job; she was suspended by a supervisor the same month and then let go several months later, which she believes was due to Ramos.
‘When she blocked him from seeing her Facebook page, he found things she wrote on other people’s pages and taunted her with it, attaching screenshots of the postings to some of his emails.
‘She called police, and for months he stopped. But then he started again, nastier than ever.
‘All this without having seen her in person since high school.’
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.
His 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.
The Twitter account uses the handle @EricHartleyFrnd – the name of one of the former staff reporters on the paper, Eric Thomas Hartley.
The profile picture is a photo of Mr Hartley, who now works at a newspaper in Norfolk, Virginia, with an anime ‘sacrifice’ symbol photoshopped onto his forehead.
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