5 are reportedly dead and at least 20 more injured after a gunman opened fire at the Capital-Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, this afternoon. A suspect is in custody, but police have yet to release any details and reports from the scene offer no clues as to motive or the shooter’s identity.
Update: The shooter was named as Jarrod Ramos. From a Twitter feed widely identifed as his, it seems apparent Ramos had long nursed a grudge against the newspaper following a 2012 lawsuit he’d filed and lost over a story it published.
From The Baltimore Sun, the Capital-Gazette’s parent newspaper:
Phil Davis, a Capital Gazette crime reporter who was in the building at the time of the shooting, said multiple people were shot, as others — himself included — hid under their desks. He said there was a lone male gunman.
“Gunman shot through the glass door to the office and opened fire on multiple employees. Can’t say much more and don’t want to declare anyone dead, but it’s bad,” Davis wrote on Twitter as he waited to be interviewed by police.
“There is nothing more terrifying than hearing multiple people get shot while you’re under your desk and then hear the gunman reload.”
In a subsequent interview, Davis said it “was like a war zone” inside the newspaper’s offices — a situation that would be “hard to describe for a while.”
Just yesterday, far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos called for vigilantes to “gun down” journalists “on sight”; two days ago, President Donald Trump described American media as “the enemy of the American people.”