A Maryland detective determined that suspected Capital Gazette newsroom shooter Jarrod Ramos wasn’t a threat, years before the alleged gunman opened fire on its staffers.
When the now-retired editor and publisher of the Annandale daily paper Thomas Marquadt called the cops on Jarrod Ramos in 2013 – a detective investigated and said he didn’t believe the accused killer was dangerous, Anne Arundel County Police Chief Timothy Altomare said on Friday.
The detective, Michael Praley, said in a report at the time that he “did not believe Mr. Ramos was a threat to employees” at the paper, noting that Ramos hadn’t tried to get into the building and hadn’t sent “direct, threatening correspondence.”
Ramos, 38, who filed a defamation lawsuit against the paper in 2012 for an article about him pleading guilty to harassing a woman — had been firing off threatening tweets aimed at the Gazette and its journalists.
An attorney for the paper showed cops a trove of tweets in which Ramos “makes mention of blood in the water, journalist hell, hit man, open season, glad there won’t be murderous rampage, murder career.”
Newspaper representatives ultimately decided not to press charges, fearing it would “put a stick in a beehive.”
Later, in 2015, Ramos continued to write disturbing tweets about Gazette journalists, including one where he said he wanted the paper to stop publishing but “it would be nicer” to see two of its reporters “cease breathing.”
Then Ramos went silent for two years – until Thursday when he allegedly squeezed rounds out of a shotgun and killed five staffers at the Capital Gazette.
The police chief said some new posts went up just before the killings, but authorities didn’t know about them until afterward.
Investigators are reviewing Ramos’s social media postings and searching his apartment, where Altomare said they found evidence that he had been planning the attack.
With Post wires