US media identified the suspected shooter as Jarrod Ramos
A man armed with a shotgun and smoke grenades burst into a newspaper office in the US city of Annapolis on Thursday, killing five people in what police described as a "targeted attack." Officials said the shooting at the Capital Gazette newspaper was carried out by a white adult male resident of Maryland state who was being questioned in custody.
There were five fatalities and two superficial injuries, the acting police chief of Anne Arundel county, Bill Krampf, told a news conference in Maryland's capital. The Baltimore Sun -- which owns the Capital Gazette -- named Rob Hiaasen, the paper's assistant editor, who mentored young journalists and wrote in a "wryly observant" style, as one of the victims of the shooting.
Krampf said that police did not yet know the shooter's motive, but "we know that there were threats sent to the Gazette through social media." "We're trying to confirm what account that was and we're trying to confirm who actually sent them," Krampf added. US media identified the suspected shooter as Jarrod Ramos, whom the Sun said had a long-running dispute with the newspaper over a 2011 story "that covered a criminal harassment case against him."