Qualla: Capital Gazette Shooting

Capital Gazette Shooting: Introduction

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The next morning's edition of The Capital went to print on time. Five of the newspaper's colleagues were dead, the office at 888 Bestgate Road looked like a war zone, and the survivors had spent the evening being interviewed by detectives. None of that stopped the staff of the Capital Gazette from doing what community journalists do: they published the paper. The opinion page ran blank except for a small note -- "Today we are speechless" -- a silence that said more than any editorial could. The June 28, 2018 attack on the newsroom near Annapolis, Maryland, was the deadliest assault on journalists in modern American history. It claimed the lives of five people who had devoted their careers to covering their community. What followed was not just grief but defiance -- a small newspaper's insistence that the work would continue, that the press would not be silenced.

Read more: Capital Gazette Shooting on Qualla

Capital Gazette Shooting: The People Behind the Bylines

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Rob Hiaasen, 59, was the assistant editor and weekend columnist whose generous mentoring shaped younger reporters across the newsroom. John McNamara, 56, was a sports reporter whose coverage was a dream job he never tired of. Gerald Fischman was the editorial page editor known fo...

Read more: Capital Gazette Shooting on Qualla

Capital Gazette Shooting: A Grudge That Festered for Years

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The attack was not random. In 2011, The Capital had published an article about a man's guilty plea for criminal harassment of a former high school acquaintance. The subject of that article, enraged by the coverage, filed a defamation lawsuit against the newspaper in 2012. The cas...

Read more: Capital Gazette Shooting on Qualla

Capital Gazette Shooting: The Paper That Would Not Stop

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Reporters for The Capital began covering the shooting as it happened -- from inside the newsroom and while racing back from assignments in the field. In the hours after the attack, while 170 people were being evacuated from the building to a reunification center at the nearby Wes...

Read more: Capital Gazette Shooting on Qualla

Capital Gazette Shooting: Guardians of the First Amendment

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On April 15, 2019, The Capital received a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation honoring "the journalists, staff and editorial board of the Capital Gazette, Annapolis, Maryland, for their courageous response to the largest killing of journalists in U.S. history in their newsroom." The ...

Read more: Capital Gazette Shooting on Qualla