WASHINGTON — Court records obtained by WUSA9 show the accused shooter who killed five journalists from the Capital Gazette newspaper on Thursday spent years filing lawsuits, petitions and motions against a long list of people who came in his line of sight.
Anne Arundel county prosecutors have charged Jarrod W. Ramos with five counts of murder in the first degree.
WUSA9 sifted through more than 300 records, diving into Ramos’s history inside and outside of the courtroom.
The documents obtained by WUSA9 begin in 2011, when a woman Ramos attended high school with asked law enforcement to file charges against him for harassment. The victim told prosecutors Ramos began contacting her via the internet in 2009.
In a handwritten statement seeking a peace order, the victim told the court “initially the nature of these emails was friendly,” but said later they became “increasingly alarming, vulgar, and incoherent.” She alleged Ramos told her to harm herself and called her place of employment with a disparaging remark.
The court granted her request for a peace order in 2011, the first of at least two the victim filed and granted against Ramos.
He eventually pleaded guilty to one count of harassment on July 26th, 2011. He was sentenced to 18 months of probation, which included a responsibility to attend counseling and have no contact with the victim,-a condition he’d later seek to “clarify.”
On July 31, 2011, a reporter for the Capital Gazette, Eric Thomas Hartley, described his case in a column about internet harassment.
The story enraged Ramos.
Court records show months after the story ran, Ramos requested reconsideration of his sentence. In November 2011, a judge struck the guilty finding from the record and allowed for probation before judgment, a conditional probation before sentencing.
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