Gunman Is Found Criminally Responsible for Killing 5 at Capital Gazette

The New York Times
By Michael Levenson

The finding means that Jarrod W. Ramos will be sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison for one of the deadliest attacks on American journalists.

More than three years after a man carrying a deep-seated grudge and a shotgun blasted his way into a newsroom in Annapolis, Md., and killed five employees, a jury found Thursday that he was sane at the time and criminally responsible for his actions.

The finding means that the man, Jarrod W. Ramos, will be sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison for one of the deadliest attacks on American journalists.

Mr. Ramos, 41, had pleaded guilty in October 2019 to 23 charges, including five counts of first-degree murder, for the shooting at The Capital Gazette newspaper offices on June 28, 2018.

The second phase of the proceedings focused on whether Mr. Ramos could be held criminally responsible for his actions or whether, as doctors called by Mr. Ramos’s lawyers had argued, he had been driven by mental illness to carry out the shooting. Had the jury found that Mr. Ramos was not criminally responsible, he would have been committed to a state mental hospital.

Prosecutors argued that Mr. Ramos had methodically planned the shooting, believing that the newspaper office was a “soft target” after ruling out an attack on a Maryland court building that was more heavily guarded. Such planning, prosecutors said, showed that Mr. Ramos was mentally competent and capable of conforming his actions to the law.

Even the simple tasks that Mr. Ramos completed in his daily life — going to the bank, changing the oil in his car, taking care of his cat — demonstrated that he was mentally sound, prosecutors said.
Mr. Ramos’s lawyers described him as a loner who was fueled by delusions and who believed that The Capital Gazette and the Maryland court system were conspiring against him. The two sides presented competing testimony by expert witnesses in the trial, which lasted more than two weeks.

Six survivors also testified at the trial, recalling in painful detail the day that Mr. Ramos walked through their workplace with a 12-gauge shotgun, killing Gerald Fischman, 61, Rebecca Smith, 34, Wendi Winters, 65, Rob Hiaasen, 59, and John McNamara, 56.

The jury deliberated for less than two hours before finding that Mr. Ramos was criminally responsible for the attack.
“Finally, my husband’s soul can rest in peace,” Erica Fischman, the widow of Mr. Fischman, the newspaper’s editorial page editor, said after the verdict. “After three painful, sorrowful years, justice has finally prevailed.”

Andrea Chamblee, Mr. McNamara’s widow, said the attack had rippled across the county, state and country. She said such shootings could happen anywhere “as long as dangerous people have easy access to firearms.”

Prosecutors said Mr. Ramos had carried out the shooting as a form of revenge after The Capital Gazette published an article in 2011 about his guilty plea in a previous harassment case.

Mr. Ramos filed a defamation lawsuit against Capital Gazette Communications and several of its employees in July 2012, which a judge dismissed after Mr. Ramos could not identify anything that had been falsely reported or show that he had been harmed by the article.

Mr. Ramos had also used a Twitter account to taunt the reporter who wrote the article. He posted screenshots of court documents relating to the defamation case and railed against other newspaper employees. His tweets were laced with profanities, and often addressed employees directly.

“The state showed that he was criminally responsible that, even though he may have had a mild personality disorder, he knew what he was doing, his conduct was wrong, he appreciated the criminality,” Anne Colt Leitess, the state’s attorney for Anne Arundel County, said at a news conference.

“I think the problem is that a lot of people hear this crime and think he must have been crazy,” Ms. Leitess added. “But he wasn’t. It was all about revenge.”