On Thursday afternoon, a thirty-eight-year-old man named Jarrod Ramos killed five people at the Capital Gazette newspaper, in Annapolis, Maryland. He fired a gun into the newsroom, then stopped, reloaded—members of the staff now cowering under their desks—and then started firing again. After a mass shooting, there is usually both sadness and a sense of dread, as the country waits to discover the shooter’s identity and the nature of his grievance. But in this case the staff of the Capital Gazette already knew all about Ramos. He had been the subject of a story in the paper in 2011 that detailed how he had stalked a high-school classmate on Facebook. Ever since, he had mounted a relentless campaign of harassment and menace against the paper and its editors. Ramos sued the Capital Gazette for defamation, and lost; he maintained a Twitter feed exclusively devoted to ranting against the paper. He threatened the paper often, and some of his threats “indicated violence,” the local police chief said Thursday. Tom Marquardt, who had been the newspaper’s publisher and editor until 2012, told the Los Angeles Times last night that, “if it’s him, I’m gonna feel responsible for this. I pray it’s not him.” It was. This time there was no mystery about the killer’s motivation, no chance for opportunistic politics to creep in. His story was already laid out in the memory of the local reporters and in their newspaper’s archives.
On Thursday evening, after Ramos was in custody, I read the article about Ramos and the woman from his high school, published on Sunday, July 31, 2011—the one that set off the unravelling. The story, written by a columnist named Eric Thomas Hartley, is a small masterpiece, one that shows exactly what local newspapers can do. Its tone is terse and alarmed; no paragraph is more than three sentences. Its subject is an outwardly unexceptional criminal case in Anne Arundel Court, in which Ramos pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of harassment. The headline, ominous and artful, was “Jarrod Wants to be Your Friend.”
Here is how it begins:
As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Hartley is trying to capture, from both sides, the emotional experience of a cyclonic, almost anonymous berating that becomes hard to escape. He captures Ramos’s belittling, hectoring fury in the e-mails he sent to his victim, which are preserved in court records: “Have another drink and go hang yourself, you cowardly little lush. Don’t contact you again? I don’t give a (expletive). (Expletive) you.”
From the victim’s testimony, Hartley extracts the feeling of being pursued. He quotes her recounting of her story in court. “When it seemed to me that it was turning into something that gave me a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach, that he seems to think there’s some sort of relationship here that does not exist . . . I tried to slowly back away from it, and he just started getting angry and vulgar to the point I had to tell him to stop,” she said. “And he was not okay with that.” Hartley does not mention male entitlement, or trauma, but it is all laid bare.
In this type of case, the convicted man’s grievance often focusses on the judge, or the prosecutor, or the investigator. They are responsible, after all, for the consequences—the criminal conviction, the public ostracizing, the legal record. But Hartley’s article had exposed Ramos much more deeply. He may have thought himself invisible before the story was published—an ordinary person in an unexceptional place seeking attachment to a woman who could not remember him. Then, all of a sudden, he was seen.
When I was just out of college, I worked for the Chester County bureau of the Philadelphia Inquirer, an operation of a similar scale to the Capital Gazette. The Inquirer’s suburban strategy at the time was to hire a lot of exceptionally young reporters to provide hyper-local coverage of the towns around the city; to generate a county section, called “Neighbors,” that ran twice a week; and to fill out the back pages of the daily Metro section. There were about ten of us, and we worked out of a converted movie theatre in the middle of West Chester, the county seat. Our editor was a tightly wound, very precise African-American woman in her forties named Bettinita. Turnover was high, and new hires would tour their beat and then return with a multi-part series in their imagination, and explain to Bettinita that they were going to expose the simmering racial tensions within, for instance, the Phoenixville city council. Bettinita would nod, agree that racial tensions were simmering everywhere, and then ask what the news was—what was the eight-hundred-word story? And the reporter would exit, ambitions postponed, for an evening meeting of the water board.
Journalists give one another far too many prizes, but, even so, it was hard to see how you could win one in Chester County. I spent two and a half years there, in between the September 11th attacks and the financial crisis, when the country felt both prosperous and militantly self-assured. Chester County was especially so. Its politics were in the hands of sedate suburban Republican attorneys in their fifties who were periodically challenged by Democrats of the same profession, vintage, and mood. The only steady drama concerned development issues, the conversion of horse farms into subdivisions, the bickering over how much money would flow to whom. My first beat, which covered the area defined by the Owen J. Roberts school district, did not contain a single sidewalk. I would return in the morning from a township planning meeting and Bettinita would edit my copy, which was mostly a matter of rearranging the quotes so that the smart-sounding, context-rich account from the supervisors got buried and the bluntest and least decorous words were elevated into the lead. Our job was not to provide a theory of the case. It was to prospect for genuine feeling, amid the mundanity, and then account for it.
It turned out that the story of Chester County was the story of the struggle for emotional expression, which for some people came naturally and for others was like gasping for air. I visited a Christian psychotherapist who, hoarder-like, had stuffed his house with documents from a grisly local murder from the nineteen-twenties, which he was determined to solve. I wandered into a school construction meeting and discovered that the superintendent had required that everyone on the panel (parents, vice-principals, the contractor) read Foucault, so that the new cafeteria did not become a carceral. One morning, an elderly bus driver picked up the students on his route and simply bypassed their school and headed across state lines, into Delaware. He could not clearly explain why he had done this, either to the children, who were terrified, or to the authorities, who caught him later that morning. I was sent to ask the bus driver’s neighbors about him, and eventually I found his home, a little cabin on a rural hill in Berks County, a quarter mile from anyone else. His neighbors had no insights. I walked up to his home and knocked. No one was there. Afterward, I could not shake the feeling of the overwhelming isolation and claustrophobia of old age.
It is an ugly business, showing up at someone’s door after there has been a trauma, an accident, or a crime in which he or she was the victim or the perpetrator. I found that it worked best when I did not apologize for my presence, or for what happened. Twenty-two years old, I tried to keep my face kind but my bearing formal. The people who answered their doors often wanted to rush straight to the heart of things, to their experience of the day, to their fury at their circumstances. My hope was to arrest that emotion, to ask them first to confirm the proper spelling of their name and their exact age, and then, once they understood that there would be a structure to our conversation, to begin again. I often told the people I met on their doorsteps that they did not need to talk to me, that they could simply shut the door. Though I meant it sincerely, I found that it usually served as an accelerant. It reminded people that they did want to explain, that the police had taken the facts but no one else would hear their story.
We knew, even then, that these journalistic practices were dying. The Inquirer had three editors-in-chief in the short time I was there, each of whom reversed the strategy of the previous one. Of the dozen reporters I worked with in the Chester County bureau, I believe that I am one of only two still in journalism. Bettinita was laid off and, after another stint at a local paper, found work as a personal trainer. The decline of local newspapers is often lamented—and even more so this morning—but lamented in a particular way, as if their main role has been as municipal watchdogs, and, without them, corruption and the simple aggression of the powerful will now go unchecked. Having worked as a local reporter, I tend to think that the role of these publications was broader than that, and the loss is far deeper. We were an outlet through which ordinary people could explain themselves to strangers, without requiring the political side-taking of talk radio or the tribal insularity of the Internet. We wore laminated press passes on lanyards and carried pencils, because pens froze on cold days; we made twenty-nine thousand dollars a year. We showed up, even when it was boring. We tried to explain how it was that people in a majestically well-off place could feel so frustrated, and so angry.
The men and women who died Thursday at the Capital Gazette were not young. One of the victims was a thirty-four-year-old sales assistant named Rebecca Smith; the other four were all journalists, and all veterans. John McNamara, an editor, was fifty-six; Wendi Winters, a community reporter and columnist, was sixty-five; Gerald Fischman, the editorial-page editor, was sixty-one; and Rob Hiaasen, the paper’s editor, was fifty-nine. What resonated in their obituaries was the daily act of wading into the news in Annapolis in search of its emotional center. On Thursday, that center was easy to find—it was with their colleagues. After the killings, with the newsroom evacuated, a news photographer captured two young Gazette journalists set up across the street, working on laptops at a folding table. One of them, Chase Cook, tweeted, “I can tell you this: We are putting out a damn paper tomorrow.” They did.
A previous version of this post misstated the name of Rebecca Smith.
