Before he developed a long-running grudge against The Capital Gazette, the man who police say opened fire and killed five newspaper staffers directed his anger at a female high school classmate he barely knew.<\/p>\n
Courthouses in Maryland are clogged with lawsuits brought by Jarrod Ramos against judges, reporters and lawyers he thought had wronged him. In each case, they took the side of the classmate who said Ramos had harassed her relentlessly for a year.<\/p>\n
Ramos, 38, of Laurel, Maryland has been charged with five counts of murder in Thursday\u2019s shooting \u2014 one of the deadliest attacks on journalists in US history.<\/p>\n
Court documents and social media posts written by Ramos paint a portrait of an angry, frustrated man fuming about how he\u2019d been mistreated and maligned.<\/p>\n
His aunt, Vielka Ramos, said her nephew was highly intelligent, but was a solitary man.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe would try to communicate with people, but he was a loner,\u201d she told The Baltimore Sun.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was distant from the family. He just wasn\u2019t close to anybody,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
After his grandmother died several years ago, Ramos stopped attending family gatherings, she said.<\/p>\n
Ramos grew up in Severn, about 20 miles from Annapolis, and attended Arundel High School, graduating in 1997. In his high school yearbook photo, he is smiling, and has shoulder-length, curly brown hair and oversized glasses.<\/p>\n
In late 2009 or early 2010, Ramos contacted a former high school classmate via email thanking her \u201cfor being the only person that was ever nice, or said hello to him in high school,\u201d the woman wrote in court documents when she sought a peace order protecting her from Ramos in January 2011.<\/p>\n
She said Ramos told her about mental health issues he\u2019d been having, so she suggested a clinic. Ramos then sent her a series of hateful and vulgar emails, including calling her a \u201cdirty slut,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n
She eventually went to police, and Ramos ended up pleading guilty to a misdemeanour harassment charge. Five days after his guilty plea, the newspaper wrote a story about the case. That touched off a years-long tirade against the newspaper.<\/p>\n
Ramos filed a defamation lawsuit, but a judge dismissed the case, finding that Ramos could not point to a single statement in the article that was false. But Ramos, acting as his own attorney, pursued the case all the way up to Maryland\u2019s highest court, the Court of Appeals, which denied his petition in 2016.<\/p>\n
In his written court filings, Ramos frequently used overwrought language. In 2012, when the newspaper argued to have the case tossed out, Ramos referred to his complaint as \u201ca blob of facts \u2014 fed and grown on their own sins \u2014 and they have stepped right in it, to be eaten alive.\u201d<\/p>\n
In one court document, Ramos refers to himself as a citizen who \u201cvalues truth, integrity, equal justice under the law and fair access to the courts.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ramos was employed by an IT contractor for the Labor Department\u2019s Bureau of Labor Statistics \u2014 the agency that does the monthly jobs report and other economic data \u2014 from 2007 through 2014, a department spokesperson said.<\/p>\n
Little else is known about his work history. A lawyer who represented him in the harassment case told the newspaper he holds a degree in computer engineering.<\/p>\n
Brennan McCarthy, the lawyer who represented his former classmate, said Ramos\u2019 harassment of her was malicious.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was as angry an individual as I have ever seen,\u201d McCarthy said.<\/p>\n
After his lawsuit against the newspaper was dismissed, Ramos posted profanity-laced tweets about the paper, its reporters and editors.<\/p>\n
In 2015, he tweeted that he would like to see the paper stop publishing, but \u201cit would be nicer\u201d to see two of its journalists \u201ccease breathing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ramos\u2019 online grudge seemed to disappear for a while until some new posts appeared just before the killings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Before he developed a long-running grudge against The Capital Gazette, the man who police say opened fire and killed five newspaper staffers directed his anger at a female high school classmate he barely knew. Courthouses in Maryland are clogged with lawsuits brought by Jarrod Ramos against judges, reporters and lawyers he thought had wronged him. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35753,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35752"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35752\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35754,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35752\/revisions\/35754"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}