BALTIMORE _ A Laurel man with a long-running feud with the Capital Gazette newspaper is being held as the suspect in the deadly shooting at the Annapolis newspaper Thursday, according to law enforcement sources.
Police and federal agents gathered late Thursday outside the address of 38-year-old Jarrod W. Ramos. Rich McLaughlin, chief of the Laurel Police Department, said his officers were there as part of the investigation into the shooting at the newspaper, and other sources identified Ramos as the suspect.
In 2012, Ramos filed a defamation lawsuit against the paper and a columnist over a July 2011 story that covered a criminal harassment case against him.
He brought the suit against the columnist, Eric Hartley, naming Capital Gazette Communications and Thomas Marquardt, the paper's former editor and publisher, as defendants.
A Twitter page in Ramos' name on Thursday featured Hartley's picture as its avatar, and a banner image included photographs of Marquardt and the Capital's former owner Philip Merrill.
The page's bio read: "Dear reader: I created this page to defend myself. Now I'm suing the s--- out of half of AA County and making corpses of corrupt careers and corporate entities."
The account regularly commented on Anne Arundel County news and referenced a deadly shooting at French newspaper in 2015.
The account had been dormant since January 2016. Then at 2:37 p.m. Thursday _ moments before the Capital Gazette shooting _ the account posted a message that read: "F--- you, leave me alone."
