The gunman who murdered five employees at the Capital Gazette newspaper will serve multiple consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.
The sentence imposed Tuesday marks an end to the grueling legal battle that started on June 28, 2018, when Jarrod Ramos stormed the Annapolis newsroom with the intention of killing as many people as possible.
The sentencing hearing started Tuesday morning with emotional statements from the survivors of the attack and the loved ones of those who died.
Ramos, who meticulously plotted the attack, sat in the courtroom and watched each person as they delivered their victim impact statements.
Selene San Felice, a reporter who survived the shooting by hiding under a desk, spoke first.
“There were days I wondered why I lived or if I should live at all,” she said. “I live to spread the truth.”
“We will press on,” San Felice said.
The siblings, widows and children of those killed followed. They recalled how they learned their family member was one of the five victims and how life has changed for them since that day.
This summer, a jury found Ramos had the mental and emotional capacity to be held criminally responsible for the mass shooting. Although Ramos had pleaded guilty to the murders, he had argued he was not legally sane at the time and should be sent to a psychiatric hospital with the potential for release instead of prison. The jury had arrived at its verdict in less than two hours.
Summerleigh Winters Geimer and Montana Winters, the daughters of victim Wendi Winters, mourn outside the Anne Arundel County Circuit Court in Annapolis on Tuesday. In court, Geimer remembered calling her mother after learning about the shooting and getting her voicemail. The Washington Post/Marvin Joseph
Ramos attempted to expedite the sentencing by writing a letter to Judge Michael Wachs asking for an earlier hearing date and expressing concern with the quality of his representation. Wachs denied the request at an August hearing, siding with Anne Arundel State’s Attorney Anne Colt Leitess, who said those impacted by the attack had already booked travel to be in Annapolis for the Sept. 28 date.
“I hate to say this so bluntly,” Leitess said in court that day, “but why are we moving the case up for the defendant’s convenience?”
During the weeks-long trial in July, survivors of the shooting relived their worst days to testify before the jury. The family members of those who were killed — Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen, John McNamara, Rebecca Smith and Wendi Winters — sat in the courtroom and watched video footage of their loved one’s last breaths.
During the trial, Ramos’s defense argued that three mental disorders fed his fixation with the Capital Gazette and Maryland judiciary. But prosecutors cast Ramos as a vengeful man who grew obsessed with the local paper after it published a column in 2011 about his guilty plea in a harassment case. When Ramos lost his defamation lawsuit and failed to have the article removed, prosecutors said, he plotted a calculated rampage to end the lives of those employed by and associated with the local newspaper.
Ramos, who had filed numerous lawsuits in the years leading up to the mass shooting, said in the letter to Wachs that he does not “wish to litigate anything more.”
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