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Gunman's rampage turned quiet newsroom into chaos

When the first shot went off, shattering the glass doors to the newspaper office, people at their desks struggled to grasp what was happening. Anthony Messenger, a sports intern, thought the popping sound might be fireworks. He couldn’t see anyone.

The pair crept beneath a desk as far from the front door as they could and waited. They huddled together — silent but urgently texting a parent, sending a tweet (“Active shooter 888 Bestgate please help us”) and calling 911, but never speaking into the line for fear of being heard.

“It was insane,” Messenger, who had worked at the Capital Gazette for four weeks, recalled Friday morning in an interview on the Today show. “In that moment, I thought I was going to die.”

Thursday had begun as an ordinary day in the Capital Gazette’s first-floor office, where a framed copy of The Maryland Gazette from the 1700s hangs on one wall. Calls were being made and stories filed, as one TV monitor played national cable news and another showed how many people were reading the Capital Gazette’s website. Just after 2:33 p.m., a gunman’s rampage turned the often quiet newsroom into chaos. The entire chain of events — from the first crashing of the glass doors to the removal of a suspect by the authorities — lasted only minutes, but left five newspaper employees dead.

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Normally, to get inside the newsroom, workers used key cards or got buzzed through the glass doors. But after the gunshots shattered the glass, employees who sat closest to the doors were hit first.

The Capital Gazette’s looks like many other newsrooms around the country: a wide open layout and waist-high dividers separating clusters of L-shaped desks, covered in a sometimes untidy mix of old newspapers, pads of paper and more. “You can see from the front of the office to the back,” said Joshua McKerrow, a photographer there.

Those who sit near the back of the newsroom scrambled to the floor, hoping to go unnoticed beneath their desks. The gunman, said Phil Davis, a crime reporter who was among those to hide under a desk, was silent.

“He never said anything,” Davis said. At one point, the gunman reloaded his weapon.

Authorities say the gunman made his way from the front of the room to the back. Prosecutors say he had barricaded the rear door, apparently to prevent workers from fleeing through the only other exit. One of the people who was shot, authorities said, had tried to escape through that back door — the one Messenger had been unable to open in those first moments.

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Soon after the attack began, word was spreading to those away from the newsroom. Danielle Ohl, the paper’s local government reporter, was on vacation in the Outer Banks of North Carolina when a puzzling message came in. An editor who was not in the building was pleading, on the newspaper’s Slack messaging system, for someone inside the newsroom to call him right away. Ohl texted one of her colleagues but got no response either. Something was clearly wrong.

She finally reached Davis, who told her that there had been a shooting and that two colleagues were probably dead.

The Capital Gazette newsroom publishes two related newspapers: The Capital, which appears daily; and The Gazette, appearing Wednesday and Saturday and focusing on northern Anne Arundel County. A website combines the coverage.

The operation has a close, long-standing relationship with Annapolis, the Maryland state capital, and the surrounding Anne Arundel County. Its front-page stories sometimes send national events inside, favoring local happenings. An array of recent front page stories included a police officer placed on leave for shooting at an unarmed suspect; a 12-year-old girl who organized a Pride walk; and an increase in property taxes the city council recently passed at 3 a.m.

In turn, it is embraced as the hometown paper in a region that includes some major institutions, including the U.S. Naval Academy and Maryland state government. The Naval Academy recognized the relationship in a tweet from its official account Thursday: “The Capital Gazette is our local newspaper and is often the first to tell our story. We are grieving with their staff and loved ones after the tragic events that occurred today.”

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As quickly as 60 seconds after the shots began, law enforcement authorities arrived at the newspaper office.

Reporters and other workers began emerging from under desks — hands up — shouting: “We’re not him.”

Employees filed out of the newsroom, hands still up, having to pass the bodies of several co-workers to get out the front door.

“The office, it was kind of in shambles,” Messenger, the intern, recalled. “We tried to keep our eyes off of the ground,” he said, adding later: “It was sickening.”

Davis, the crime reporter, said that he was the last to leave the office. Police found the gunman hiding under a desk, amid the journalists in their newsroom. Davis said the gunman was calling out to the police: “He surrenders. He surrenders.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Daniel Victor, Christine Hauser and Monica Davey © 2018 The New York Times

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