Open this photo in gallery A copy of The Capital Gazette near the scene of a shooting at the newspaper's office, Friday, June 29, 2018, in Annapolis, Md. Patrick Semansky/AP PHOTO

It was early afternoon when the shotgun blasts came crashing through the glass door to the Capital Gazette. Setting off smoke grenades, the shooter stalked those in the office, firing at the paper’s staff.

When it was over, five people were killed and two injured and America’s mass-shooting epidemic – which has hit schools, churches and music festivals in the past year – came to one of its newsrooms.

The attack on the daily newspaper in Annapolis, the 40,000-strong Maryland state capital an hour’s drive from Washington, was a “targeted” slaying, police said.

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“This person was prepared to come in,” Anne Arundel County Deputy Police Chief William Krampf said across the street from the scene, a low-rise office building in a suburban big-box complex. “He was prepared to shoot people.”

Related: The victims of the Capital Gazette newspaper shooting

Read more: ‘In a lot of ways, it’s the perfect newspaper’: former Capital Gazette editor

Annapolis newspaper shooting: What we know so far



Mr. Krampf confirmed that the suspected shooter, who was captured without exchanging gunfire with police, had previously made threats against the newspaper. He said the suspect was a man in his late 30s.

Police identified the dead as Wendi Winters, Rebecca Smith, Robert Hiaasen, Gerald Fischman and John McNamara.

The Baltimore Sun, which owns the Capital Gazette, said Ms. Winters, 65, was a general assignment reporter; Mr. Hiaasen, a meticulous editor; Mr. Fischman, a 25-year veteran of the paper who crafted its voice as the writer of its editorials; Mr. McNamara, a 24-year veteran sports reporter; and Ms. Smith, 34, a recently hired sales assistant.

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Open this photo in gallery This image obtained from the Twitter account of the daily U.S. newspaper The Capital Gazette on June 29, 2018, shows the front page featuring images of the victims of a shooting at the papers' office in Annapolis, Md., on June 28. HO/Getty Images

Court records identified the suspect as Jared Warren Ramos, 38, of the nearby town of Laurel. Mr. Ramos was charged with five counts of first-degree murder early Friday. He was denied bail at a hearing Friday morning in Annapolis.

Mr. Ramos had a long-running dispute with the paper. He first complained in 2011 when the Capital Gazette reported on a criminal harassment case in which Mr. Ramos added a high school classmate on Facebook, sent her abusive messages and tried to get her fired from her job. Mr. Ramos filed a defamation suit against columnist Eric Hartley and editor Thomas Marquardt in 2012. The case was thrown out.

A Twitter account under his name, with the handle @EricHartleyFrnd, made violent threats toward the journalists. One Feb. 7, 2015, post said the tweeter would enjoy seeing the Capital Gazette “cease publication, but it would be nicer to see Hartley and Marquardt cease breathing.” A subsequent tweet claims the paper “doesn’t know how to read legal opinions.”

After a silence of more than two years, the account tweeted at 11:37 a.m. Thursday, directed at a Maryland appeal court judge: “Fuck you, leave me alone.”

Reporters at the Capital Gazette covered the shooting in their own newsroom, providing harrowing, near-contemporaneous accounts of the carnage.

In a series of tweets, Phil Davis, the paper’s police reporter, described how the shooter opened fire through the glass in front of the first-floor newsroom.

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“There is nothing more terrifying than hearing multiple people get shot while you’re under your desk and then hear the gunman reload,” he wrote.

Pat Furgurson, the Capital Gazette’s silver-haired environment reporter, attended and taped Mr. Krampf’s scrum with journalists. Afterward, he suggested no one could have imagined that threats from a member of the public could have turned into that day’s horror.

“We get threats all the time,” a shaken Mr. Furgurson said, vowing that the paper would still publish an edition the next day. Asked for his message to the public, he appeared to hold back tears: “What’s so funny about peace, love and understanding.”

Police say the shooting at a Maryland newspaper was a "targeted attack on The Capital Gazette." In a news conference Thursday, police said a white male in his late 30s has been arrested in connection with the shooting. The Associated Press

Stephen Pimpo, Jr., a former Capital Gazette reporter who now works for ABC’s Washington bureau, said he had finished his early morning shift and was on his way to a doctor’s appointment in Annapolis when he saw the news on his phone. After doing a double-take, he rushed to the scene.

Mr. Pimpo described the paper as a close-knit place with a mix of local reporters and transplants from out of state. Despite the surprise, he said the run of violence in the U.S. had always kept the possibility of the worst in his mind.

“It’s always there, it’s always in the back of your mind,” he told The Globe. “You have to think of the worst-case scenario.”

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There have been 195 mass shootings in the U.S. this year, according to the Mass Shooting Tracker website, with the killings at a high school in Parkland, Fla., in February sparking a national youth movement for gun control.

Last year, a shooting at a country music concert in Las Vegas left 58 people dead and 851 injured in the worst mass shooting in the country’s history.

U.S. President Donald Trump wrote on Twitter that he had been “briefed” on the shooting and offered “thoughts and prayers.”

His press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, went further.

“A violent attack on innocent journalists doing their job is an attack on every American,” she wrote.

- With a report from Audrey Carleton

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Open this photo in gallery Map of shooting in Annapolis Carrie Cockburn