The gunman, who shot dead five people at a newsroom in Annapolis, Maryland, was charged on Friday with five counts of first-degree murder
Jarrod W. Ramos entered the Capital Gazette newspaper group on Thursday afternoon and opened fired through a glass door, looked for victims and then sprayed the newsroom with gunfire, police and a witness said.
Rob Hiaasen, 59, Wendi Winters, 65, Rebecca Smith, 34, Gerald Fischman, 61, and John McNamara were shot and killed, the acting police chief of the Anne Arundel County Police Department, William Krampf, told a news conference.
Smith was a sales assistant and the others were journalists, he said.
The Annapolis newspaper The Capital, part of the Gazette group, published an edition on Friday with photographs of each of the victims along with “5 shot dead at The Capital” as a headline in large bold lettering on its front page.
Acting Police Chief William Krampf of Anne Arundel County called it a targeted attack in which the gunman "looked for his victims."
"This person was prepared today to come in, this person was prepared to shoot people," Krampf said.
Journalists crawled under desks and sought other hiding places in what they described as minutes of terror as they heard the gunman's footsteps and the repeated blasts of a shotgun as he moved about the newsroom.
Survivors said the shooting — though it seemed agonizingly long — lasted mere minutes. And police said their response was swift.
Police spokesman Lt. Ryan Frashure said officers arrived within about 60 seconds and took the gunman into custody without an exchange of gunfire. About 170 people were then evacuated from the building, which houses other offices, many leaving with their hands up as police and other emergency vehicles arrived.
At the White House, spokeswoman Lindsay Walters said: "There is no room for violence, and we stick by that. Violence is never tolerated in any form, no matter whom it is against."
Hours later, investigators remained on the cordoned-off site early Friday as they sought clues to the gunman's motives.
"The shooter has not been very forthcoming, so we don't have any information yet on motive," Anne Arundel County Executive Steve Schuh said.
The Capital Gazette and the Baltimore Sun orginally identified the suspect as Ramos, 38, of Laurel, about 25 miles (40 km) west of Annapolis, citing law enforcement. Annapolis is the state capital of Maryland and part of the Baltimore–Washington metropolitan area.
Ramos had brought a defamation lawsuit in 2012 against Eric Hartley, formerly a staff writer and columnist with Capital Gazette, and Thomas Marquardt, then its editor and publisher, according to a court filing.
According to a legal document, an article contended that Ramos had harassed a woman on Facebook and that he had pleaded guilty to criminal harassment.
The court agreed that the contents of the article were accurate and based on public records, the document showed, and in 2015, Maryland’s second-highest court upheld the ruling rejecting Ramos’s suit.
Ramos tweeted that he had set up a Twitter account to defend himself, and wrote in his biographical notes that he was suing people in Anne Arundel County and “making corpses of corrupt careers and corporate entities.”
Phil Davis, a Capital Gazette crime reporter, said he had been hiding under his desk along with other newspaper employees when the shooter stopped firing, the Capital Gazette reported on its website.
The newsroom looked “like a war zone,” he told the Baltimore Sun.
Capital Gazette runs several newspapers out of its Annapolis office. They include one of the oldest newspapers in the United States, The Gazette, which traces its origins back to 1727.
