New London — The Day's publisher, Patricia Richardson, was serving as publisher of The Capital Gazette in 2013, when the man charged with Thursday's deadly shooting at the Annapolis, Md., newspaper office lost his defamation lawsuit and started making threats against employees on his Twitter account.

"We took them incredibly seriously," Richardson said Friday during an interview in her office. "We got our lawyers and law enforcement involved to investigate and consult with us. We made the staff aware of him and his rumblings. We were advised we were doing all we could do. Nothing overt had ever happened."

Richardson served as publisher of the Capital Gazette from January 2013 to September 2014 and said she knew four of the people who died in Thursday's shooting.

"I am heartsick by what has happened," Richardson said. "We were a very close-knit newspaper and these folks were like family. My heart goes out to Capital employees, their families and the community."

Keeping employees safe is a priority, Richardson said, and The Day is taking extra security precautions in the wake of Thursday's shooting.

Jarrod W. Ramos was ordered held without bond when he was arraigned Friday on five counts of first-degree murder. He had made the threatening posts in the spring of 2013, after a judge dismissed his defamation lawsuit against the paper, but took no overt action beyond the hateful posts on social media, Richardson said. The paper's management distributed Ramos' photograph, already familiar to those in the newsroom, throughout the company and kept an eye on his social media accounts.

Following the shooting, Twitter took Ramos' account off-line.

"We felt we took all the action we could take at the time," Richardson said. "I feel terrible about what has happened but, in a free society, I don't know what we could have done differently. He was a credible threat, and we took him very seriously."

Richardson said the newspaper had about 200 employees and was in a one-story building in Annapolis when she was publisher. The Capital — now a smaller paper owned by Tronc Inc., which also owns the Hartford Courant — is headquartered in the office suite where the shooting took place.

Richardson left the Capital Gazette to become publisher of The Virginian-Pilot in the fall of 2014 and remained there until she became publisher of The Day on May 7.

Though the police said the shooter deliberately targeted each victim during his rampage, Eric Hartley, who wrote the 2011 story about Ramos that prompted his defamation lawsuit in 2012, since has moved on to another publication, The Virginian-Pilot. Also named in the lawsuit was Thomas Marquardt, who retired prior to Richardson's tenure.

Ramos was enraged by the newspaper's story, entitled "Jarrod wants to be your friend," that detailed his Facebook correspondence with a former classmate who at first befriended Ramos but later complained to police that he was harassing her, according to court records.

Ramos pleaded guilty to criminal harassment in the District Court of Maryland and was sentenced to 18 months' probation and ordered to attend therapy and to stay away from the victim and her family.

He represented himself in the defamation lawsuit, which a judge dismissed in March 2013 after finding that the article was not defamatory, was accurate and was a matter of public interest. He appealed the decision and lost in September 2015, when Judge Charles E. Moylan Jr. wrote that Ramos appeared not to have learned his lesson and that "a discussion of defamation law would be an exercise in futility, because the appellant fails to come close to alleging a case of defamation."

k.florin@theday.com