ANNAPOLIS, Md. — An Anne Arundel County judge sentenced the man who blasted his way into the Capital Gazette newsroom and killed five people to five life sentences without the possibility of parole Tuesday.
Judge Michael Wachs handed down the sentence after hearing from survivors of the mass shooting and the family members of Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen, John McNamara, Rebecca Smith and Wendi Winters, who died in the attack. The gunman was also sentenced to 220 years for assault and firearms offenses. All sentences will be served consecutively, Wachs ruled.
A jury in July found Jarrod Ramos, 41, was criminally responsible after a 12-day trial to determine whether he was sane at the time of the crime.
Ramos in October 2019 pleaded guilty to the entire indictment: five counts of first-degree murder, one count of attempted first-degree murder, six counts of first-degree assault and 11 counts of using a firearm in a felony crime of violence. The maximum sentences add up to six terms of life in prison, five without the possibility of parole, plus 200 years.
Ramos pleaded not criminally responsible, Maryland’s version of the insanity plea, and jurors determined within two hours that he should be sent to prison for life rather than treated at a hospital for an undetermined amount of time.
Their verdict came after roughly half-a-dozen delays of the trial for legal reasons and because of the coronavirus pandemic.
During the trial, the six people who survived the attack testified in great detail about the 19 minutes from the time Ramos breached the glass newsroom door with a shotgun blast to the time authorities apprehended him, hiding under a desk. All of the survivors said they thought he would kill them, as he did their colleagues, four of whom died in the office. Smith died in the hospital.
At sentencing Tuesday, survivors and victims’ family members gave statements describing the trauma the shooting inflicted upon them.
In court, Ramos was described as having no friends and living most of his life with his cat in a one-bedroom apartment in Laurel. There, he ruminated over a 2011 Capital Gazette column about his harassment conviction and filed a dizzying array of lawsuits trying to rectify his gripe with the newspaper, the woman he tormented and attorneys for both. When his legal recourse ran out, he began planning the attack.
He conducted extensive research, studied blueprints of the Annapolis building, disguised himself to do reconnaissance of the office suite more than a year before the shooting, stockpiled weapons and ammunition, and practiced loading and unloading the Mossberg shotgun he bought online and picked up at the Bass Pro Shops in Hanover.
On the day of the shooting, Ramos deployed barricades before opening fire. He meticulously maneuvered about the newsroom, working the pump on the shotgun and concealed himself after calling 911 to say he surrendered and was no longer armed. After his capture, he said little in custody during almost eight hours of Anne Arundel police and FBI interrogation.
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