The Capital Gazette still published its daily newspaper after five employees were shot dead and more were critically wounded at its office in Annapolis, Maryland Thursday.
Hours after the deadly shooting, Capital Gazette reporter Chase Cook said he and his colleagues would publish a paper on Friday. “I can tell you this: We are putting out a damn paper tomorrow,” Cooke tweeted.
The paper released its Friday cover featuring its 5 slain colleagues minutes after midnight.
Maryland law enforcement identified the deceased: Reporter Wendi Winters, assistant editor Robert Hiaasen, sales associate Rebecca Smith, editorial writer Gerald Fischman and reporter John McNamara.
Reporters set up a makeshift newsroom at a nearby parking garage to work on Friday’s edition, which included tributes to their deceased colleagues
“Stories on all five bright, wonderful lives will be included in the following tweets,” the paper told its 52,000 followers.
The Capital Gazette left its opinion section blank to pay tribute to the dead.
“Today, we are speechless,” the section reads “This page is intentionally left blank to commemorate victims of Thursday’s shootings at our office.”
A GoFundMe account set up for a Maryland newspaper where a gunman killed five people and injured two others has raised more than $20,000 within just three hours.
The account was set up by a fellow journalist, Bloomberg Government reporter Madi Alexander. By 8 p.m., the total donations had reached more than half the $30,000 goal.
The GoFundMe page urged people to give what they can to help the newspaper’s journalists pay for medical bills, funeral costs, newsroom repairs, and other expenses.
The alleged gunman who killed five people at a Maryland newspaper has been identified as Jarrod Ramos, a man who had a feud with the paper going back several years, officials said Thursday.
Ramos, 38, pleaded guilty to one charge of criminal harassment on July 26, 2011, and was given a suspended 90-day jail sentence. Five days later, the Capital Gazette newspaper published a story about Ramos’ case, which involved stalking and harassing a woman on Facebook, USA Today reported.
The story, written by Capital Gazette staff writer Eric Thomas Hartley, was titled “Jarrod wants to be your friend” and included details of Ramos’ case. Ramos reached out to the woman, who was not named in the story, “out of the blue” to thank her for “being the only person to ever say hello or be nice to him in high school.”
The woman didn’t know who Ramos was but responded and began a friendly, if awkward, email exchange. Ramos apparently divulged information about personal problems and the woman suggested he see a counselor and thought she was being kind.
But her suggestion “sparked months of emails in which Ramos alternately asked for help, called her vulgar names, and told her to kill herself,” the article states. Ramos also “emailed her company
and tried to get her fired.”
The harassment went on for several months, eventually ending in Ramos’ conviction and 90-day suspended sentence. And afterward, he directed his anger towards the Capital Gazette for printing the story about him.
In 2012, Ramos sued Hartley and his newspaper for defamation. But during a hearing on March 29, 2013, Judge Maureen M. Lamasney threw out the case.
“At the motion hearing, Judge Lamasney probed the appellant to point out a single statement in the article that was actually false or to give a single example of how he had been harmed by the article,” court documents state. “He could not do so.”
Ramos took his anger to Twitter, where he appeared to have created an account to expand his harassment to Hartley and the Maryland courts.
Ramos later appealed Lamasney’s decision. But on September 17, 2015, the judge’s ruling was affirmed in the Maryland Court of Appeals.
The Associated Press and United Press International contributed to this report.
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