The man, Jarrod W. Ramos, had previously pleaded not guilty on 23 charges, including five counts of first-degree murder, after what is considered the deadliest attack against journalists in the United States. A circuit court judge in Maryland, Laura Ripken, accepted Ramos’ plea and found him guilty after a lengthy hearing Monday.
Editors, reporters and a sales assistant were killed in the June 2018 shooting at The Capital, a daily newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland. Ramos had a long history of conflict with the Capital Gazette, the community newspaper chain that publishes The Capital.
A trial to determine whether he is criminally responsible is expected to start Nov. 4.
Prosecutors said they had assembled overwhelming evidence proving that Ramos had carried out the attack. In court filings, prosecutors said they planned to show the jury surveillance videotape of the shooting, in which a gunman is seen firing shotgun blasts through the newspaper office’s glass doors and then continuing to fire once inside.
If Ramos is found not criminally responsible, he could be sent to a state psychiatric facility instead of prison.
Ramos had filed a defamation lawsuit against Capital Gazette Communications and several of its employees in July 2012, about a year after it published an article about his guilty plea in a previous harassment case. In that case, he was sentenced to 18 months of supervised probation and ordered to attend counseling.
A judge dismissed the lawsuit when Ramos could not identify anything that had been falsely reported or that he had been harmed by the article.
This article originally appeared in
.