5 years after Capital Gazette shooting, survivors and families begin to heal, but scars remain: ‘Moving with the pain’

BALTIMORE — Capital Gazette photographer Paul Gillespie begins the workday in a dimly lit home office cluttered with mementos of career milestones and the people he’s lost. On this June morning, much weighs on his mind.

“I feel alone,” said Gillespie, 53.

His father died in 2008, followed by his mother in 2014, then his brother in 2017. Despite that grief, he found family and purpose in his work.

But that was almost ripped away, too.

Wednesday will mark five years since a man armed with a shotgun and a grievance fired his way into the Annapolis newsroom of the Capital Gazette, fatally shooting five of Gillespie’s co-workers: Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen, John McNamara, Rebecca Smith and Wendi Winters. Gillespie was one of six people in the office that day to survive the mass shooting, fleeing from beneath his desk during a lull in gunfire, narrowly avoiding a blast of buckshot as he escaped.

Over those five years, Annapolis mourned those killed in the deadliest attack on an American newsroom and family members marked milestones without them. Officials built memorials to honor the dead. The gunman’s grueling court case concluded with him serving life in prison. Victims families and survivors settled a lawsuit against the news organization’s parent companies, The Baltimore Sun and Tribune Publishing.

Still, scars visible and invisible remain.

“I missed being killed by an inch,” said Gillespie, who has worked at the Capital Gazette for 22 years. “Sometimes you think, ‘Man, why did I get to go on?’”

He was one of several survivors and family members of those slain who opened up to a reporter about their experiences of enduring impacts of trauma and grief. Those interviewed said they believed it was important to keep their colleagues or loved ones’ memories alive and to shed light on the lasting effects of the mass shootings that continue to plague America.

For many, extensive therapy and time has helped, but life is full of triggers that can cause flashbacks and physical reactions. Finding a new normal can require acknowledging some things will never be the same again. Intense trauma can yield pervasive symptoms.

“What am I doing?” Gillespie asked himself as he prepares to leave for work. “OK. That’s packed, turn this off.”

He walks out the door in Brooklyn Park, gets in the car and sets off for Annapolis.

Reporter Selene San Felice survived the shooting, hiding in the newsroom she worked in for just nine months. From under a desk, she witnessed a co-worker shot dead.

Some things you can’t un-see or un-feel, and San Felice lives with the effects of what happened to her that day.

“I’ve learned to cope with all those things,” said San Felice, who goes to therapy regularly and takes medication. “The trauma is part of my life, but it doesn’t rule my life anymore.”

The unexpected can still elicit a visceral, life-or-death reaction. So when one night in May someone set off fireworks, it sent her searching for cover in her home in St. Petersburg, Florida.

“I’m this 27-year-old woman hiding in the bathroom having to call my parents because someone lit off fireworks,” San Felice said. “So, it still impacts my life, but I have to get off the floor and keep going.”

In Florida, she now works for the news organization Axios. She owns the house she lives in. She confronts her trauma in the writing she does for a part-time Master of Fine Arts program from New York University.

For Capital Gazette media sales consultant Janel Cooley, 47, faint scars remain on her right hand from the cuts she suffered falling on shattered glass as she ran out of the newsroom, passing two mortally wounded colleagues on the way out.

In the immediate aftermath, she found herself reading about other mass shootings and watching interviews with survivors. She wanted to know about their experiences, hoping they could help her know what to expect. “I guess just to see like, ‘OK, they’re leading normal lives now,’ or semi-normal, or ‘What I’m feeling during this time is normal because other people felt it as well.’”

She now avoids those stories and shows, knowing they can set her back.

And, like San Felice, Cooley believes some things will always trigger intense physical reactions reminiscent of that day. When people drop heavy weights at the gym, she jumps and her heart begins to race.

But she noticed recently she’s not as hypervigilant in crowds, no longer scanning for exits. Last month, she attended a sold-out Taylor Swift show in the Philadelphia Eagles’ stadium, and enjoyed the pop star’s hourslong set.

Gillespie’s route into Annapolis that day takes him near, but not directly past, the Capital Gazette’s former newsroom in an office building at 888 Bestgate Road.

“How could it be five years?” Gillespie wondered aloud. “It feels like it was just yesterday.”

Unknown to him or his co-workers at the time, the gunman studied the building and surveilled it before executing an attack long in the making. He harbored a grudge because the news organization published a column about him harassing a woman, and he began plotting and preparing for the killings when the courts rejected his last attempts at legal recourse — some two years before June 28, 2018.

Moments before the attack, the gunman wedged a barricade underneath the back door to trap employees. He deployed a smoke grenade in the hall and adjusted the flashlight and laser sight on his shotgun. Then, he blasted through the glass front door of the office, moving methodically and shooting people as he encountered them. When he was done killing, he hid under a desk to disguise himself as one of his victims.

A coffee shop now stands in the place of that newsroom.

Gillespie hasn’t been to it, and he doesn’t need to go. The city is full of reminders.

Driving east on West Street, Gillespie passes the restaurant where survivors and families retreated throughout the gunman’s trial.

And around the corner, on Church Circle, is Anne Arundel County Circuit Court. That’s where Jarrod Ramos admitted to all of his crimes, but maintained he was not criminally responsible by reason of insanity.

Three years and one day after the shooting, Ramos stood trial to determine whether he was sane at the time of the shooting. Over almost two weeks, jurors heard disturbing accounts of his lack of remorse, saw video of the attack captured by newsroom security cameras and heard survivors, including Gillespie, recount the horrors they witnessed.

The jury quickly found him criminally responsible, and in September 2021, the presiding judge sentenced Ramos to six life sentences plus hundreds of years in prison.

“He’s serving life for five murders, but he’s also serving life for shooting at me, and changing my life forever,” Gillespie said. “Luckily, or I don’t know, I guess luckily, he missed me. I don’t think I would’ve wanted to have felt that, but then also feeling the aftereffects is also not great, the aftereffects in my head.”

Down Duke of Gloucester Street Gillespie goes, toward the city’s waterfront. He makes a left on Compromise Street.

The five granite pillars of the Guardians of the First Amendment memorial rise from the ground on his left, each representing the life of a friend he doesn’t want the community he covers — or the world that to him seems to have become numb to mass shootings — to forget.

There was Fischman, 61, an eloquent editorial writer who in his free time professed his love for his wife in the poems he penned for her. And Hiaasen, 59, an editor with a gift for mentoring young reporters when he wasn’t playing the role of doting dad and loving husband. And McNamara, 56, a community editor better known for his sports writing, and, posthumously, for his devotion to his wife. And Smith, 34, who had only recently started as an ad sales assistant, but who fought through the pain of endometriosis to come into the office every day and cheered others up. And Winters, 65, a features writer so prolific community members wondered if she’d cloned herself, not to mention the strong, supportive mother of four children.

“She appeared in my dream last night,” Phoenix Geimer, 33, wrote to his three siblings in a group chat Nov. 29, 2018.

That message was about five months after their mother, Winters, died charging the shooter with trash and recycling bins, providing enough time for co-workers to take cover. Similar messages continue five years later.

“We’ll mention if we have a noteworthy dream with Mom in it. We call them ‘visits,’” Geimer said by phone from Italy.

The line went quiet.

“I didn’t cut out,” he said, “I got choked up.”

The years-old message Geimer sent his siblings recounted a vivid dream featuring places from their childhood, a memorial service and dialogue that captured their mother’s personality.

“I looked up to my right and there she was. ‘Wendi!’ ‘Ah,’ she said three times — the way she acts when she’s flattered but trying to be modest by implying the attention is misdirected,” Geimer’s message read. “Even in the dream she was a ghost and never stopped working.”

These memories are what her children have left as milestones come and go without her. Two of Winters’ daughters have married without her: Winters Leigh Larca in 2019 and Montana Geimer the next. Larca gave birth to a child.

Summerleigh Geimer, the youngest at 25, started a new life in Milwaukee. She got engaged last July. The engagement ring on her left hand resembles her mother’s wedding ring, which she wears on her right.

A crate of young children’s toys sits behind Hiaasen’s desk at his family’s home in Timonium. The stuffed animals belong to a granddaughter he never got to meet.

While time has repressed some of Maria Hiaasen’s pain from losing her husband, the “gut punch” of learning that he died and how it happened still feels fresh.

“Those memories start flooding back and you can’t believe it’s been five years. You just can’t,” Maria Hiaasen said. “It seems such a crime for Rob to have missed some of the things he’s missed.”

The couple’s oldest, Ben, married and had a daughter who is nearly 2 years old. Sam, the middle child, is approaching four years of sobriety. And the youngest, HH, got a dream job teaching graphic design full-time at Virginia Commonwealth University.

“‘We’re not going to let that guy win,’ that was sort of always our attitude,” said Maria, who has found a partner who makes her happy. “We’re going to live happy lives, or as happy as we can be, because we know that’s what Rob would want.”

Sam Hiaasen, 32, agrees with that sentiment now, but said it took a while to realize that it was OK to let go of some of her pain, because she felt like the trauma of her dad’s death was the only connection to him she had left.

“That was really hard to come to terms with, the fact that how he died is not how he lived,” Sam said. “The pain is not him. The love is him.”

But when she celebrates four years sober, she said, she knows she’s going to want to hug her dad, who all the siblings called “Big Rob.” HH, 31, wanted to call him up when they got promoted to full time at VCU. Both siblings take some comfort knowing he would be proud.

“It’s not that I’m moving on, necessarily, I’m moving with it. We’re moving with the pain,” HH said.

At City Dock, Gillespie unloads camera gear from the back of his SUV.

Despite a heart attack last June, he keeps going to work every day.

“Seeing people on the job is great,” Gillespie said. “It’s a distraction that I enjoy, instead of sitting around with my own thoughts.”

His assignment that day takes him aboard the Wilma Lee, a skipjack that belongs to the Annapolis Maritime Museum & Park. Gillespie strikes up a conversation with the captain, whom he knows from previous assignments.

An older woman who reads The Capital approaches Gillespie onboard and compliments his photography. The woman had bumped into him about a year before, when he was recovering from heart surgery, and knows something about what he’s been through.

“You’re doing OK now?” she asked.

“I’m doing the best I can,” Gillespie responded.

As the sailboat rides the breeze into the Severn River, Gillespie scours the deck for interesting angles to capture through his camera’s viewfinder — pictures that would later go on the front page.

In these moments, his mind is free.