Woman 'Tormented, Terrorized' By Accused Shooter Ramos Speaks Out

ANNAPOLIS, MD — A woman who was first harassed by the Capital Gazette shooting suspect says she worried for years that he would kill her anywhere at any time, freezing her in fear and changing her life forever. Jarrod Ramos is charged with five counts of murder for allegedly gunning down newspaper employees as an act of revenge for his grudge over a newspaper story that outlined how he had stalked the woman to the point that she moved out of Maryland.

“I would be afraid that he could show up anywhere at any time and kill me. I have been tormented and traumatized and terrorized for so long that it has, I think, changed the fiber of my being,” she told NBC News, which concealed her identity and did not use her full name.

The torment began years ago when Ramos emailed Lori to ask if she remembered him from high school, and she said she didn’t. In coming months after they emailed a few times, he berated her for not responding quickly enough to his messages, then in a rage told her to kill herself, and to be prepared to get a protective order against him.

The victim described Ramos as cold, calculated and intelligent. “One thing I do feel now is he can no longer silence me,” Lori said in the interview that aired Monday.

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The harassment of his schoolmate began in 2009 or 2010, when Ramos located her on Facebook and messaged his thanks to her for being the only person ever to say hello or be nice to him at Arundel High School, which they attended together more than a decade earlier.

He was having troubles, Ramos told her, so she wrote back, trying to help. She suggested counseling.
From there, Ramos went on a year-long email barrage, alternately pleading for her help, peppering her vulgar names and urging her to kill herself. He emailed her employer and tried to get her fired. When she notified police, he stopped contacting her for a few months but then resumed with emails nastier than ever.

Those actions, included in a 2011 Capital article, were acknowledged by Ramos as part of his guilty plea.
Judge Jonas D. Legum initially sentenced him to 90 days, but then suspended the jail time and placed him on probation. At the time, Ramos was a federal employee with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

On July 23, 2012, a year after the story was published, Ramos sued reporter Eric Thomas Hartley; the paper's editor, Thomas Marquardt; and Capital Gazette Communications, LLC, the paper's owner. The story, by Hartley, then a Capital staff writer and columnist, detailed how Ramos had used social media and email in a year-long barrage of threats against his former classmate.

Attorney Brennan McCarthy of Annapolis, who represented the woman Ramos stalked for years, said she moved out of Maryland because she was afraid for her life. The harassment and stalking began in 2009 after the woman friended her former classmate on Facebook. In 2011 she filed a harassment charge against Ramos, he pleaded guilty, and was given 18 months probation.

"He was as angry an individual as I've ever seen," McCarthy told CBS News. "She lost her job because of this individual. He's malevolent. He forwarded a letter to her employer basically stating that she was bipolar and a drunkard, which is ridiculous."

The Capital then reported on the conflict, with the headline "Jarrod Wants To Be Your Friend." Hartley has declined to comment on his contacts with Ramos.

"Mr. Ramos was obsessively angry about this particular story," McCarthy said.

McCarthy said when he heard about Thursday's shooting at the paper, he knew the gunman was Ramos.

"He did it. It was inevitable. He was going to do something violent, the only question was who would he get first," McCarthy said.

SEE ALSO:

• Annapolis Shooting: 5 Murder Counts Filed In Capital Gazette Case
• Editor Had Feared Suspect As 'Crazy Enough' To 'Blow Us All Away'
• Annapolis Shooting: Here Are The 5 Capital Gazette Victims
• How To Help Capital Gazette Victims, Staff After Shootings

In 2012 Ramos sued The Capital for defamation, but the case was dismissed on appeal in 2015 when a judge ruled nothing in the newspaper story was false. After the story was published, the paper's editor, Thomas Marquardt, would begin fearing for his own life and for the safety of his staff.

Ramos had admitted to the threats against his classmate, pleading guilty in Maryland Circuit Court to criminal harassment. He claimed, though, that The Capital's article about the case was defamatory, and he quickly switched targets, aiming at the paper's reporter and editors in incendiary letters and online posts.

He created a Twitter page that featured a picture of Hartley. He posted stories about violence against other reporters, including the 2015 attack at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris that left 12 people dead and the shooting of two Virginia television journalists killed on live television later that year.

In 2012, Ramos tweeted a picture of Marquardt with Sen. Barbara Mikulski.

"Stay away from him @senbarb," Ramos wrote. "He's DOOM. I watched you at the gates of Journalistic Hell. Don't believe me? Check a map."

In a 2015 post, Ramos wrote: "I'll enjoy seeing @capgaznews cease publication, but it would be nicer to see Hartley and Marquardt cease breathing."

Marquardt acknowledged Thursday that he feared Ramos, but not because of the defamation claim. A judge dismissed the lawsuit after Ramos failed to name one factual error in The Capital's story. His appeal to overturn the ruling was rejected soon after.

"He waged a one-person attack on anything he could muster in court against the Capital," Marquardt, the newspaper's editor and publisher until 2012, told the Los Angeles Times following the shooting.

That was nothing, though, compared to the persistent, wild intensity Ramos maintained for years.

"I said during that time, 'This guy is crazy enough to come in and blow us all away,'" Marquardt recalled, adding that he and other newspaper officials had fretted over how to stop Ramos' harassment.

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.'"

In a separate interview with the Virginian-Pilot, Marquardt said police didn't believe they had a case.

"I felt personally threatened by the guy," Marquardt said. "I was worried about my well-being, my wife's well-being, and the staff's. We were all concerned at the time."

The reporter and the other defendants filed court papers arguing the lawsuit was baseless and asked the court to dismiss it. On March 29, Judge Maureen M. Lamasney held a hearing on their request.

When she asked Ramos to identify a single false statement in the article, he could not.

"It all came from a public record," the judge told Ramos. "It was of the result of a criminal conviction. And it cannot give rise to a defamation suit."

She dismissed the lawsuit.

When he tried to overturn the ruling, the opinion upholding Judge Lamasney's decision was harsh.

"The appellant [Ramos] was charged with a criminal act," Judge Charles E. Moylan wrote in the opinion rejecting the appeal. " The appellant perpetrated a criminal act. The appellant plead guilty to having perpetrated a criminal act. The appellant was punished for his criminal act. He is not entitled to equal sympathy with his victim and may not blithely dismiss her as a 'bipolar drunkard.' He does not appear to have learned his lesson."

Includes reporting by Patch Editor Todd Richissin.

Photo: Five wood markers stand in a makeshift memorial outside the Annapolis Capital Gazette offices for the employees killed by a gunman last week July 2, 2018 in Annapolis, Maryland. The five victims were Gerald Fischman, 61, an editorial editor; Rob Hiaasen, 59, an editor and columnist; John McNamara, 56, a sports reporter and editor; Wendi Winters, 65, a news reporter and columnist; and Rebecca Smith, 34, a sales assistant. Police arrested Jarrod Ramos, 38, in the paper's newsroom and he is being held without bond on five counts of murder. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)