Eric Hartley is the former Capital Gazette journalist who was sued after writing an article about Jarrod Ramos in 2011. On June 28, 2018, Ramos was accused of going into the Gazette newsroom and shooting dead five people while injuring several more. The Capital Gazette reported in September 2015 that Maryland’s second highest court had upheld a ruling in their favor against Ramos. Ramos was accusing the newspaper of defamation following a 2011 article by Hartley about Ramos. The piece made reference to Ramos’ criminal record, a guilty plea to an harassment charge. The claim was first made by Ramos in July 2012 and was first dismissed shortly afterward because the suspect didn’t include supporting evidence. The case was dismissed again in October 2012 when Ramos sued again. You can read the full case documents here via the Washington Post. Prince George’s Circuit Court Judge Maureen M. Lamasney first dismissed the claim saying that the piece was “based on public records and Ramos presented no evidence it was inaccurate.” During the case, Ramos represented himself, according to the Gazette. The original article was titled, “Jarrod Ramos wants to be your friend.” Here’s what you need to know: 1. Hartley Originally Wrote that Ramos Pleaded Guilty to Harassing a High School Friend Who is Jarrod Ramos? What we know about the Capital Gazette shooterPolice identified Jarrod Ramos, 38, as the suspected shooter at the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Md., on June 28. Five people were killed in the shooting. Read more: wapo.st/2lLfBEN. Subscribe to The Washington Post on YouTube: bit.ly/2qiJ4dy Follow us: Twitter: twitter.com/washingtonpost Instagram: instagram.com/washingtonpost/ Facebook: facebook.com/washingtonpost/ 2018-06-29T11:16:13.000Z According to Eric Hartley’s Twitter account, he is now working for the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk. The Pilot wrote, the day after the Capital Gazette shooting, “Annapolis newspaper shooting suspect harassed Virginian-Pilot editor for years.” The article details the content of Hartley’s original article which said that Ramos had pleaded guilty to misdemeanor harassment. Ramos was accused of trying to befriend a woman he went to high school with on Facebook. Ramos said that he wanted to thank her for being nice to him in high school. Hartley wrote, via the Pilot, “That sparked months of emails in which Ramos alternately asked for help, called her vulgar names and told her to kill herself.. He emailed her company tried to get her fired.” Hartley wrote that Ramos’ actions led the woman to “live in fear for her safety for months.” The woman was fired from her banking job, something she attributed to Ramos’ actions. The woman filed charges against Ramos in 2011. Thomas Marquardt, the then-editor of the Capital Gazette, told the Pilot, “I felt personally threatened by [Ramos]. I was worried about my well-being, my wife’s well-being, and the staff’s. We were all concerned at the time… [The Police] didn’t think there was a case.” Hartley’s article identified Ramos as working for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics having graduated from college with a degree in computer engineering. 2. Jarrod Ramos Said That Hartley Was Going to ‘Journalist Hell’ On his Twitter page, Ramos went by the moniker, “@EricHartleyFrnd.” Hartley regularly featured as a topic on Ramos’ profile. In December 2015, Ramos tweeted that Hartley was going to “Journalist Hell.” In June 2015, Ramos said that Hartley was “scared s***less.” In February 2015, Ramos posted this photo to Twitter, comparing Hartley to Star Wars villain Jabba the Hutt. The same month as the Jabba the Hutt photo, Ramos wrote that Hartley was a “veteran bad journalist and proudly irresponsible, like @Charlie_Hebdo.” On January 7, 2015, Islamist gunmen stormed the offices of French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo and killed 12 people. Ramos made another reference to the shooting on January 10. In October 2014, Ramos tweeted that Hartley had “no ethics.” When Hartley moved to California to take a job with the OC Weekly, Ramos tweeted, “Yes, Eric Thomas Hartley, you moved to… oh just go ahead and kill yourself already before I do (legally in court).” One Ramos’ first tweets referencing Hartley goes back to October 2012 when he wrote, “Eric Hartley admitted he is not a “good reporter.” He is bad. Sometimes the best defense is to send an opposing offense to Journalist Hell.” 3. Hartley Says He Is, ‘Curious, Skeptical of Authority & a Little Annoying Kenny Alexander's final moments before becoming Norfolk's mayorIn an exclusive behind-the-scenes interview, Kenny Alexander speaks with Pilot reporter Eric Hartley minutes before walking outside Norfolk City Hall and taking the oath of office Friday, July 1, 2016 as the city's 99th mayor. 2016-07-01T23:39:44.000Z In a section of the Pilot’s website titled, “Why I am a Journalist,” Hartley writes, “If you’ve ever spent time around kids, you know how annoying it can be when they won’t stop asking, “But why?” That question is a big part of my job, and it suits my personality: curious, skeptical of authority, perhaps a little annoying. A functioning society needs people to ask why – and to tell you the answers we find.” In 2015, Hartley won a courage in journalism award in Las Vegas for his coverage of billionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson. The Las Vegas Review Journal reports that Hartley left the newspaper before the story came to full fruition. On his Facebook page, Hartley says he is the Norfolk/Portsmouth editor of the Pilot. 4. An NBC Editor Said the U.S. ‘Could Use’ More Journalists Like Eric Hartley New details on suspect in Maryland newspaper mass shootingThe suspect, identified by law enforcement sources as Jarrod Ramos, lost a defamation suit against the Capital Gazette, according to court records. 2018-06-29T14:54:24.000Z As news of Hartley’s connection to Jarrod Ramos spread, Asher Klein, a digital news editor with NBC tweeted, “He’s about to be a part of the news cycle because the Annapolis newsroom shooter is apparently obsessed with him, so let me just say for the record that Eric Hartley is one of the best journalists I’ve ever had the pleasure to know and this country could use many more like him.” The San Diego Business Journal’s Sarah de Crescenzo commented on the tweet saying, “Ditto. Top notch.” The Tennessean’s Mike Reicher wrote, “I saw Eric’s photo on the suspect’s Twitter page! What the hell?” 5. Hartley Was Laid Off From the OC Register After Just 6 Months on the Job In September 2014, the OC Weekly reported that there were massive layoffs at the OC Register, were Hartley had just begun working as a courts reporter. Hartley told the OC Weekly, ” Not even six months on the job if I’m remembering correctly. Was proving to be a good one–and now, nothing.”<doc-sep>Jarrod Ramos has been identified by officials as the suspect involved in the deadly shooting at the Capital Gazette office. He is suspected of killing at least five people in a targeted attack. Jarrod W. Ramos, 38, has years and hundreds of Twitter posts dating back to 2012, when he filed a defamation lawsuit against Eric Hartley, Thomas Marquardt, and the Capital Gazette. The lawsuit was dismissed in 2013 and the dismissal was upheld in 2015. Here are some of the many tweets that Ramos made over the years. His Twitter account was listed under his name, Jarrod W. Ramos, but the handle was @EricHartleyFrnd, a reference to the reporter Eric Hartley who had written an article about Ramos that angered him. Warning: Many of these tweets use profanity and some people may find them disturbing. He Posted About How Hartley & Marquardt Would Be Better Off If They ‘Ceased Breathing’ He referred to Marquardt as “Evil Tom.” His profile picture was actually a photo of Hartley. He Tweeted Disturbing Messages About Charlie Hebdo At one point, he made a series of disturbing tweets referring to Charlie Hebdo. The massacre happened on January 7, 2015, when two brothers armed with rifles killed 12 people and injured 11. His tweets were shortly after the horrific events unfolded. The tweet below refers to Brennan McCarthy, a lawyer in the area and another subject of many of his messages. He Seemed to Like Trump Although most of his posts were not political in nature and very few referred to Presidents, he did make a favorable tweet about President Donald Trump. He Tweeted Angry Posts About the Capital Gazette & Other People Although Marquardt and Hartley were the focus of his lawsuit, they were not the only ones he tweeted about. This photo shows lawyer Brennan McCarthy’s picture on a Borg cube. He also tweeted about Steve Gunn. And he made a number of tweets referencing Rick Hutzell. He also tweeted frequently about Judge James Lombardi. In fact, Ramos had a second Twitter account named “Judge James Lombardi” that only made a few tweets, compared to the 800+ from his main account. He tweeted about Marquardt there too. The profile photo for his second account looks like this: His description for the second account, @judgelingJJL, reads: “Not James J. Lombardi, the most disgraceful # judgeling I’ve seen. He wants to censor me in absentia, but he can eat my s***. Very truly yours, Jarrod W. Ramos This is a developing story.<doc-sep>New York: The emails were friendly to begin with, but soon turned sinister – a chain of correspondence that would lead, almost a decade later, to five counts of first-degree murder. Around late 2009 a female graduate of Arundel High School, a suburban public school in Gambrills, Maryland, was contacted out of the blue on Facebook by a man claiming to be a former classmate. He thanked her for being the only person at school to say hello or be nice to him. She didn't remember the man, whose name was Jarrod Ramos, but Google searches confirmed they had attended school together.<doc-sep>
An armed suspect, identified as Jarrod Ramos, open-fired inside the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis, Maryland, killing five journalists. It was later uncovered that he bore a longtime grudge against the newspaper ever since they ran a news report against him in 2012. "He had some type of conflict with the paper in general," said Lt. Ryan Frashure, an Anne Arundel County Police spokesman, CBS affiliate WFMY News 2 reported. Frashure’s sentiments were echoed by Anne Arundel County Deputy Police Chief William Krampf. "This was a targeted attack on the Capital Gazette," he said. "This person was prepared to shoot people. His intent was to cause harm." Ramos, 38, had pleaded guilty in Anne Arundel County on a charge of criminal harassment back on July 26, 2011, and got a 90-day suspended sentence. This was following an instance where he was accused of continually harassing a woman on the internet. Photo: Getty Images/ SAUL LOEB A few days later, former Capital Gazette reporter Eric Thomas Hartley ran an article on Ramos, making him an example to warn people of the dangers that internet holds. "If you're on Facebook, you've probably gotten a friend request or message from an old high school classmate you didn't quite remember," Hartley wrote in the story. "For one woman, that experience turned into a yearlong nightmare." He also exposed real-life details about Ramos’ case in the article, talking about how Ramos had got in touch “out of the blue” with the woman who sued him for harassment and began stalking her on social media, starting with the pretext of thanking her for being nice to him in high school. "That sparked months of emails in which Ramos alternately asked for help, called her vulgar names and told her to kill herself," the story mentioned. "He emailed her company and tried to get her fired." In conclusion, Hartley wrote: “The case is extreme. But it provides a frightening look at the false intimacy the Internet can offer and the venom that can hide behind a computer screen.” In 2012, Ramos filed a defamation suit against the newspaper for running the article. The suit was first dismissed by Prince George’s Circuit Court Judge Maureen M. Lamasney in 2013. At the time, the court claimed that Hartley’s piece was “based on public records and Ramos presented no evidence it was inaccurate.” In 2015, Capital Gazette reported that Maryland’s second highest court had upheld a ruling in their favor against Ramos, Heavy reported. However, that did not stop Ramos from personally going against Hartley. He changed his Twitter handle to “@EricHartleyFrnd.” Apart from that, he regularly attacked the journalist on his Twitter profile. On October 2012, Ramos wrote: “Eric Hartley admitted he is not a ‘good reporter.’ He is bad. Sometimes the best defense is to send an opposing offense to Journalist Hell.” In February 2015, Ramos posted this photo on his social media page, comparing Hartley to “Star Wars” villain Jabba the Hutt. In the same month, the suspect wrote Hartley was a “veteran bad journalist and proudly irresponsible, like @Charlie_Hebdo.” When Hartley eventually left his job at the Capital Gazette to work for OC Weekly in California, Ramos mockingly threatened his life. “Yes, Eric Thomas Hartley, you moved to… oh just go ahead and kill yourself already before I do (legally in court).” Meanwhile, Hartley won a courage in journalism award in 2015 for his coverage of billionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Hartley is currently working for Virginian Pilot in Norfolk. The newspaper has a section called “Why I am a Journalist” on its website, where Hartley wrote: “If you’ve ever spent time around kids, you know how annoying it can be when they won’t stop asking, ‘But why?’ That question is a big part of my job, and it suits my personality: curious, skeptical of authority, perhaps a little annoying. A functioning society needs people to ask why – and to tell you the answers we find.” Apart from attacking Hartley, Ramos also targeted Capital Gazette in general, running a website from 2012 to 2014 where he published e-mail messages with Gazette staff accusing them of harassment.