One year after five Capital Gazette employees were gunned down in their local Maryland newsroom, a memorial has been unveiled in their honor.
The memorial features a plaque with the names of the victims, Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen, John McNamara, Wendi Winters, and Rebecca Smith, in a garden with five rosebushes.
Capital Gazette shooting victims remembered with this memorial garden in Acton’s Cove waterfront park in Annapolis. It’s been a year since the massacre. One rose bush planted for each victim. #News4 @nbcwashington pic.twitter.com/wIwEvQs1J4
— Chris Gordon (@ChrisGordonNews) June 28, 2019
Rick Hutzell, editor of the 30,000-circulation daily published in Annapolis, said the community is lucky to be served by a local newspaper at a time when the saturation of local news is shrinking across the country.
“This community is very lucky,” Hutzell said. “It has what a lot of communities have lost and that is a newsroom. A newsroom is a room full of people who turn up every day to celebrate our successes to point out what is wrong and to ask what could be better.
“That is what journalism is about, so it is extremely fitting that this is where this garden is … it’s a place where people come for a quiet moment to think about things,” he added.
Hutzell said that Hiaasen, one of the victims, used to come to the same tranquil garden to contemplate his work. He said that the memorial was fitting for the memory of those lost.
“Come here and think about what these five lives meant,” Hutzell said. “I am far richer for having known them, and I am far poorer for having lost them.”
The shooting occurred last year when a gunman stormed the newsroom, shooting through the glass door with a pump-action shotgun before turning it on employees. The suspect, 39-year-old Jarrod Ramos, entered an insanity plea and is awaiting trial.
Newspaper staff, including some who escaped the gunfire that day and the families of the victims showed up to Friday’s memorial.
