Journal of Threat Assessment and Management, Vol 13(2), Jun 2026, 139-165; doi:10.1037/tam0000244
On June 28, 2018, a lone offender conducted a mass shooting at the Capital Gazette newspaper office in Annapolis, Maryland, killing five and injuring two. Seven years prior to the incident, the newspaper published an article, reporting the assailant had been convicted and put on probation for harassing an acquaintance from his high school days, which resulted in a defamation lawsuit against the paper in 2012. The case and several others he filed were ultimately dismissed before the highest court in the state of Maryland in late 2015. During the litigation, the perpetrator sent hundreds of concerning social media communications on Twitter to the newspaper, utilizing metaphorically violent language, identifying with other mass attackers who killed journalists, engaging in target dispersion toward others, but communicating no direct threats that could have resulted in criminal prosecution. He suddenly went dark in January 2016, and over the next 2.5 years, he planned and prepared for the attack, while his targets assumed he had moved on. This case is an extreme illustration of the phenomenon of “going dark” (Kupper & Meloy, 2023) and the inverse correlation between observable online and on-the-ground behaviors in targeted attackers. We structured our retrospective threat assessment of the case with the indicators of the Terrorist Radicalization Assessment Protocol–18, which we also applied to more than 800 tweets that the subject posted between 2011 and 2018. The analyses highlight the risk management importance of the proximal warning behaviors of pathway, fixation, and identification (Meloy, 2017); evidence of target dispersion as a risk accelerant; and the devolution of a personal violence-justifying ideology into a misanthropic state of mind. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved)