The suspect accused of killing five people in a gun rampage in a US newsroom had a long-running feud with the newspaper and regularly threatened staff in social media rants.
Jarrod Warren Ramos, 38, has been charged with shooting dead five members of staff at the Maryland Capital Gazette's office.
Ramos, a resident of Laurel, Maryland, sued the paper and one of its journalists in 2012 for defamation after columnist Thomas Hartley wrote a piece about Ramos’ harassment campaign against a woman.
Mr Hartley said that, according to court documents, Ramos sent the victim numerous emails in which he called her vulgar names and told her to kill herself.
The lawsuit named Hartley, its then editor-publisher Thomas Marquardt, and Capital-Gazette Communications, then the parent company of the paper.
Ramos had pleaded guilty to criminal harassment five days before Hartley published his column, records showed. He claimed in court documents that his perspective was not fairly represented. His lawsuit was dismissed in 2013, and an appellate court upheld the dismissal in 2015.
As the case made its way through the courts, a Twitter user calling himself Jarrod W. Ramos posted numerous tweets critical of Capital Gazette, Hartley and the Maryland judges.
"Yes, Eric Thomas Hartley, you moved to ... oh just go ahead and kill yourself already before I do (legally in court)," the user tweeted in 2014.
The following year the account posted: “I’ll enjoy seeing @capgaznews cease publication, but it would be nicer to see Hartley and Marquardt cease breathing.”
The account went silent from January 2016 until Thursday, just before the shooting at the newsroom.
Maryland Capital Gazette Newsroom Shooting Victims - In pictures
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Rob Hiaasen, 59, Wendi Winters, 65, Rebecca Smith, 34, Gerald Fischman, 61, and John McNamara were shot and killed, the acting police chief of the Anne Arundel County Police Department, William Krampf, said.
Police said a male suspect has been detained but did not confirm his identity.
