Jarrod Ramos: The Stalker Walked Free

Piers Morgan beat me to it. He echoed my thoughts about Jarrod Ramos yesterday in his Daily Mail column. Not to hedge or to build suspense, the question that has haunted me is this: why was this maniacal stalker still walking the streets? What do you have to do to a woman before the criminal justice system takes you out of circulation? Do they not distinguish between free expression and assault with words? What is wrong with the American criminal justice system, with its punctilious concern for the free speech rights of people who stalk, that allowed him to walk free?

And, where are the feminists when a broken legal system cannot protect an innocent young woman from a stalker who harasses her, who makes her life a living Hell?

Morgan had it right:

My rage this time though is not solely about the absurd weakness of America’s gun laws.

It actually lies more with the abject failure of the US justice system to properly punish a man who had terrorised an innocent, vulnerable young woman in such a despicable way that she felt forced to SLEEP with a gun to protect herself from him.

As it transpired, she had very good reason to fear for her life.

Ramos should have been jailed for a very long time for what he did to that woman.

Instead, the man she described as a ‘f***ing nut job’ and ‘your next mass shooter’ was allowed to walk free and carry on threatening and harassing other people until he finally shot up a newsroom.

That is the real disgrace here.

That is the real shame.

What Ramos did was terrorism. It was an assault. It damaged a woman to the point where she had to move her residence twice and had to sleep with a gun. Where are the feminists when it's time to stand up for women?

Ramos had it in for the Annapolis newspaper because it had reported on his harassment. What did he do? Here is the story, first, via Morgan:

That harassment began with a simple Facebook message thanking the woman, who he hadn’t seen or had any contact for over a decade, ‘for being the only person ever to say hello or be nice to him in school’.

But it quickly escalated into a relentless, horrendous stalking campaign that saw his poor victim forced to change her name, move three times and finally leave the state.

Ramos bombarded her with menacing emails, called her vile names, and told her to kill herself.

He even contacted her employer to make horrible, untrue claims that led to her being suspended and then let go.

She called the police, and briefly, he stopped harassing her. But then he started again, nastier than before.

The woman told a TV reporter that she had grown so frightened of Ramos she had to move THREE times and now slept with a gun, adding: ‘He’s a f***ing nut job.’

If the woman in question and the newspaper and the criminal justice system followed procedure… then clearly there is something wrong with procedure. And yet, we do not see any marches calling for stronger anti-stalking laws. Why do you think that that is?

Once again, it is utterly incomprehensible to any rational human being why this hideous man wasn’t stopped before he committed his outrage.

Once again, it is almost beyond belief that someone like Ramos was able, as police confirmed today, to legally buy his weapon within the last 18 months.

What more did he have to do to prevent himself from being able to lawfully buy a firearm to commit the murder he’d been repeatedly threatening to commit?

President Trump insists the real problem with America’s gun violence epidemic isn’t guns but mental illness.

In another article, from the AP, via the Daily Mail, the woman’s lawyer explains in more detail what happened:

The woman, who went to high school with Ramos and was the subject of an extended harassment campaign dating back to 2009, is still living in fear even though he is in custody, McCarthy said. 

'Stalking victims never get their sense of security back. It is never really over,' McCarthy said. 'You will always feel those eyes on you.' 

McCarthy described the case as the 'worst case of harassment and stalking I have ever encountered in my career.'

Again, it isn’t as though no one knew that Ramos was dangerous. He did not come out of the woodwork. As happened with Nikolas Cruz, everyone knew. Everyone feared him. He should have been locked up. Yet, our criminal justice system failed to do so.

Want more details about the stalking? Here goes, again from the woman’s lawyer:

He was communicating by telephone, by text, by Facebook, by instant messaging, and he was just saying outrageous things like, 'you should kill yourself,'' McCarthy said. 'He wrote to her work saying, 'She is a bipolar drunkard and you should fire her.' She actually lost her job.'

  

'After that, his obsession turned to me, too, and he started harassing my sister and my family,' said McCarthy, who lived in fear for his 19 nieces and nephews who live in the Annapolis area.

Ramos sued the Capital Gazett over a column that reported the facts of his harassment conviction, and launched a hate-fueled campaign against the newspaper on social media.

Ramos launched so many social media attacks that retired publisher Tom Marquardt called police in 2013.

Altomare disclosed on Friday that a detective investigated those concerns, holding a conference call with an attorney for the publishing company, a former correspondent and the paper's publisher.

The police report said the attorney produced a trove of tweets in which Ramos 'makes mention of blood in the water, journalist hell, hit man, open season, glad there won't be murderous rampage, murder career.'

The newspaper ultimately declined to press charges out of fear of 'putting a stick in a beehive.'

Really, why did the newspaper decline to press charges? Fear and trembling? If they had pressed charges, perhaps Ramos would have been where he belonged, in prison.