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Gunman in Capital Gazette shooting in Annapolis gets 5 life sentences

Newspaper Shooting Sentencing
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ANNAPOLIS, Md. — The gunman who killed five staff members of the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, in 2018 was sentenced Tuesday to five consecutive life sentences behind bars without parole.

The sentence is what the prosecution had asked the judge to sentence Jarrod Ramos to without the possibility of parole.

The shooting took the lives of John McNamara, Gerald Fischman, Wendi Winters, Rob Hiaasen, and Rebecca Smith.

Ramos pleaded guilty to all the charges against him in 2019 by reason of insanity.

A jury trial was held back in July to decide if he was criminally responsible for the murders. The trial lasted 12 days with each side bringing dozens of witnesses and experts to the stand. It took the jury an hour to decide that he is criminally responsible for the deaths of those five staffers.

Tuesday was the final phase of the years-long process.

This story was originally published by Keyarah Watson and Ryan Dickstein at WMAR.