A letter that arrived on Monday at a Maryland law firm reportedly bore this chilling message: I’m going to the office of the Capital Gazette, the document read, “with the objective of killing every person present.”
The letter was signed by Jarrod W. Ramos, the name of the accused gunman in last week’s deadly shooting at the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis. It was dated June 28, the day of the massacre.
Ramos, who had a long-running feud with the Capital Gazette, mailed three threatening letters before he stormed the newsroom, killing five, police told The Baltimore Sun and The Washington Post.
One letter was sent to a former Capital Gazette attorney and obtained by the Sun. “You were too cowardly to confront those lies, and this is your receipt,” read the document, written to resemble a court filing.
Attached to the document was a note addressed to retired Judge Charles Moylan Jr., who sided with the Capital Gazette in a 2012 defamation case Ramos brought against the paper for coverage of a criminal harassment case against him.
“Welcome, Mr. Moylan, to your unexpected legacy: YOU should have died,” the letter read.
The other letters were sent to the Baltimore courthouse and the Maryland Court of Special Appeals, the Post reported. Authorities didn’t reveal the contents of those letters.
A spokesman for Anne Arundel County police told the Sun that investigators were examining the letters.
“It could point to different things,“said spokesman Marc Limansky. “It could maybe open up another avenue of exploration.”
Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen, John McNamara, Rebecca Smith and Wendi Winters were killed in the shooting. Their faces and stories have filled the front page of the Capital Gazette in recent days.
“We will never forget [them],” the paper wrote of the colleagues in a gut-wrenching editorial on Sunday.
Investigators have described the shooting at the Capital Gazette as a “targeted attack.”
Ramos is being held without bond on five counts of first-degree murder.