Law enforcement identified the man who shot and killed five people at Capital Gazette in Annapolis, MD, as Jarrod Ramos.
Ramos sued the publication in 2012 for defamation, but the judge tossed the case in 2015. Instead of waiting for facts, many people and the media immediately jumped to conclusions and blamed President Donald Trump’s rhetoric.
The Capital Gazette reported in September 2015:
Maryland’s second-highest court last week upheld a ruling in favor of Capital-Gazette Communications, a former reporter and a former publisher accused of defamation.Jarrod Ramos of Laurel made the defamation claim in Prince George’s County Circuit Court in 2012 after a 2011 column by then-Capital staff writer Eric Hartley about Ramos’ guilty plea to criminal harassment.Prince George’s Circuit Court Judge Maureen M. Lamasney dismissed Ramos’ claim in 2013, saying the article was based on public records and Ramos presented no evidence it was inaccurate.Ramos, who represented himself, appealed the decision to the Maryland Court of Special Appeals, which upheld Lamasney’s ruling in an opinion filed Thursday.”A lawyer would almost certainly have told him not to proceed with this case,” the court wrote in the opinion. “It reveals a fundamental failure to understand what defamation law is and, more particularly, what defamation law is not.”
His reported Twitter account is still up and I took some screenshots.
The Los Angeles Times reported that the profile picture is the man who wrote an article on Ramos in 2011 that identified him as a man who “was convicted of criminally harassing a woman who had turned down his advances.”
The Los Angeles Times spoke to former editor and publisher Tom Marquart:
“He waged a one-person attack on anything he could muster in court against the Capital,” Tom Marquardt, the newspaper’s editor and publisher until 2012, told the Los Angeles Times in a phone interview.“I said during that time, ‘This guy is crazy enough to come in and blow us all away,’” Marquart said, adding that he and other newspaper officials had fretted over how to stop Ramos’ harassment.Marquart said police couldn’t arrest Ramos for his behavior toward the newspaper, and the paper was reluctant to sue him in court. “The theory back then was, ‘Let’s not infuriate him more than I have to.… The more you agitate this guy, the worse it’s gonna get.’”As he spoke to The Times, Marquart’s voice grew tense as he recalled his fear of Ramos, and how he’d felt powerless to do anything to stop the harassment.
We all know that some people and media try to blame Trump for everything and it came to no one’s surprise that many blamed Trump’s media rhetoric on the shooting. Even AFTER confirmation, some tried to tie it to Trump.
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