On Thursday, Chase Cook sat down at a coffee shop in Annapolis, Maryland, near the temporary new home of the Capital Gazette newspaper group, where he’s worked as a reporter since 2014. Cook, who is thirty-one, wore his Capital press badge, bluejeans, and a gray T-shirt that read “JOURNALISM MATTERS: Today More Than Ever,” which he’d acquired a few years ago. “I’m wearing this to a memorial tonight,” he said, of the shirt. “I can’t wear my suit anymore.” Earlier this week, after attending the last of five memorial services for his colleagues who were killed in last month’s shooting at the Capital Gazette’s office, one of the paper’s photographers had tweeted, “We are like a traveling team in a grief league.” “And it’s totally true,” Cook said. “I only have so many nice shirts and jackets. I’m a local reporter.”

Cook was born in Oklahoma, where he also went to college. After a few internships and a stint at the now defunct Prince George’s County Gazette—where he covered the spelling bee and “some buck-wild council meetings”—Cook took a job at the Capital Gazette to report on county and state politics. On June 28th, when a gunman had opened fire in the Capital Gazette’s office, Cook was at home. “I was in basketball shorts,” he told me, “playing a fucking video game.” Having worked until midnight a day earlier, covering elections, he’d been given a day off by the paper’s assistant editor, Rob Hiaasen. Hiaasen was one of the five people killed.

A tweet that Cook posted a few hours after the shooting, as he tried to report on it from a pickup truck with two other Capital Gazette staffers, went viral. “I’d been tweeting that we didn’t know how many had been killed, we didn’t know this, we didn’t know that,” he said. “Well, I wanted to tweet something certain.” So he wrote, “I can tell you this: We are putting out a damn paper tomorrow.” The tweet was liked nearly sixty-five thousand times.

Cook has taken on arguably the hardest post-shooting assignment for his paper. “I’m covering the fucking Ramos trial,” Cook said, referring to Jarrod Ramos, the suspected shooter. “I don’t even know if it’s ethical. I think it is. I’m gonna treat it as unbiasedly as possible.” He’d volunteered for the assignment despite his editor’s concerns that he’d be further traumatized. “If the Baltimore Sun covered it for us,” he told me, “that would mean the shooter wins.” (Hearings for the trial are scheduled to begin on July 24th, though delays are likely, including a possible challenge to its current location.)

On Wednesday, Cook drove to the Maryland detention center where Ramos is being held. “It’s weird to still call him ‘suspected shooter,’ ” Cook told me. “The human part of me is, like, He doesn’t work at the Gazette, and he was arrested there after the shooting. Obviously, he did it.” He went on, “But the journalist is, like, He’s suspected. He’s been charged with the murder. But he hasn’t been convicted yet.”

Cook wanted to talk to Ramos. “I thought, Maybe he’ll gloat about the shooting, and I can write a hell of a story,” Cook explained. But the staff at the jail had turned him away. “The guy at the place said, ‘First of all, it’s too high-profile. You’ve got to talk to administration. Secondly, what are you doing here? I feel bad, but, no, we can’t let you talk to him.’ I said, ‘Would you turn a regular citizen away?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ ”

On his way there, Cook had imagined the conversation that he and Ramos might have had. “I don’t know if I could have kept my cool,” he said. “I mean, he might have said nothing. He could have said he didn’t do it. He could have said he did it and then stared at me for thirty minutes. He could have banged on the glass to scare me and said, ‘I wish I’d killed you.’ Or, ‘I‘m glad I killed your friends.’ Tons of stuff. The one thing I was told was, ‘Don’t freak out. Don’t say something that will cause problems or ruin the case for the murder of your colleagues.’ ”

Cook has been digging into Ramos’s life. A few days after the shooting took place, he met a man who went to high school with Ramos. The man gave Cook a yearbook with Ramos’s signature in it. “There’s a nice, smiling photo of him as a high-school student tucked into page 128 of that 1997 yearbook,” Cook said. “The year he graduated high school. I’m sitting there, going, How do I treat this as a reporter? Also, I wish I could just burn the fuck out of this thing.” Cook was happy to return the book to his source. “I couldn’t keep it,” he said.

At 2:15 P.M. on Thursday, Cook’s daily Outlook alert went off, reminding him to send Hiaasen his “story slugs” for the day. “I still haven’t deleted it,” he said, of the alarm. “I don’t want to.” Cook talked about Hiaasen, whom he’d spoken to by phone about four hours before the shooting, about a headline. “In one of our last conversations,” he said, “Rob was asking me to explain this ‘Westworld’ Season 2 finale. I was, like, ‘I don’t know, man. Nobody knows. Anybody who claims to know is just a really good guesser.’ ”

Before Cook returned to work, he flipped through the day’s paper. On the cover was a piece by Tim Prudente, a former Gazette staffer who now works for the Baltimore Sun, and who was one of several Gazette alumni who came back to the paper this month to help out. Prudente’s story was about a revival of mussels in a nearby creek. “He came down to Annapolis to cover the shooting for the Sun,” Cook said, of Prudente. “He got assigned the story of talking to me, Pat, and Josh,” two of Cook’s colleagues, “who were trying to report on the shooting from the pickup truck with me. I thought, at the time, Do I tell Tim everything I’ve heard? Who is reportedly dead? Do I give a competitor that information? Am I not being compassionate if I don’t? Tim knew Rob and Wendi well.” He sighed. “This whole thing is so complicated and sad.”