A woman whose harassment by the suspect charged in the Capital Gazette shooting said she immediately panicked when she learned of the attack.

Five employees of the Annapolis, Maryland, newspaper were killed last Thursday. The suspect was arrested.



Speaking to NBC’s Today show in an interview aired on Monday, the woman said relentless abuse forced her to move out of Maryland, where the suspect is now charged with five counts of murder.

“I would be afraid that he could show up anywhere at any time and kill me,” she said. “I have been tormented and traumatized and terrorized for so long that it has, I think, changed the fiber of my being.”

NBC agreed to obscure the woman’s features and use only her first name, Lori.

She described her first contact with the suspect, years ago: “He reached out to me via email, to ask if I remembered him from high school. I replied to him, nicely, that I did not.”

Several more exchanges followed, she said, until, months later, she said she didn’t write back quickly enough for him. “He said, ‘F you, go kill yourself. You’re going to need a protective order,’” she recalled.

The suspect eventually pleaded guilty to harassing the woman, which the newspaper reported, and from that point on he launched a vendetta against the Gazette, threatening its staff online and in the courts.

In 2013, the newspaper decided not to press charges.

“He is very cold, he is very calculated, he is very intelligent,” the woman said. But “one thing that I do feel now is that he can no longer silence me.”