Another Disgruntled Misogynistic White Male Commits Murder

Yesterday’s murders of five newspaper employees in Annapolis, Maryland, along with serious injuries to two of their colleagues, has an all-too-familiar genesis.

The dead employees, four reporters and a sales assistant for The Capital Gazette—a daily paper with a pedigree that originates in the 18th century—were trapped behind a glass entry wall and their desks by 38-year-old Jarrod Ramos wielding a shotgun and homemade smoke bombs. The shotgun had been legally purchased a year earlier.

Prior to his deadly assault the shooter had barricaded the back door, preventing several victims from escaping. Several surviving Gazette employees huddled under their desks when the shooter paused to reload, at least two of them texting or twittering for help.

Ramos had some years earlier embarked on an online social media campaign against a former classmate from Arundel High School through Facebook and then by emails. Ultimately, after criminal charges were brought against him, Ramos pleaded guilty in July 2011 to criminal harassment. He was sentenced to 18 months of supervised probation, therapy, and no contact with his victim or her loved ones.

A Gazette reporter Eric Hartley—who was not one of the five murdered Gazette employees—interviewed the victim and described in a 2011 column following the guilty plea how the Defendant had stalked his victim online, terrifying her and, she believed, causing her to lose her employment.

A year after publication of the Gazette article, the shooter sued Hartley, the Gazette, and the paper’s former editor and publisher for defamation (actually, essentially for not describing the harasser’s justification, such as it purported to be), but when the case came up for trial the court found in favor of all defendants and dismissed the action. Any attorney can tell you that the most common defense to a defamation action is truth, and the Maryland court apparently held that the Gazette article had been accurate and truthful.

The shooter’s appeal of the adverse civil defamation judgment ended ultimately in dismissal.

Refusing to let the matter rest there, in response to the failure of his court case the shooter then created a website further detailing his complaints against both the reporter and the Gazette. He also created a Twitter account that from time to time threatened the Gazette and rattled its employees.

Hence, in the seven years that elapsed between the shooter’s guilty plea in 2011 and the actual murders yesterday, the shooter seems to have been obsessed with his grievances against both the victim and more recently against the newspaper, and felt ultimately impelled to go on a killing spree.

After an intervening period of silence, the shooter posted a final message to the world from his twitter feed the day of the murders, i.e., “Fuck you, leave me alone.”

That’s what young red-blooded American men do in this country to justify their right to publicly pursue and harass women who reject them and to avenge their honor when they are held accountable:

Kill the bastards, as many of them as you can. Just pick up a gun and blow them all away.

The shooter made no effort to flee the crime scene but was apprehended hiding beneath one of the targeted Gazette desks in the midst of the five dead and two injured employees he had shot, and he surrendered his weapon to law enforcement with his hands up.

A coward to the end.