Mark Wilson, GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA, AFP | People attend a candlelight vigil to honour the five people killed at the Capital Gazette newspaper ANNAPOLIS — Flowers, a notebook, a newspaper tied with white ribbon: these are some of the items placed at a makeshift memorial near the newsroom where a gunman shot dead five people in the US city of Annapolis.

The shooting rocked Annapolis — the capital of Maryland — a city of fewer than 40,000 residents where employees of the small local newspaper are known to many.

“The people who worked here are our friends, our neighbors, our colleagues, so it’s sort of like a part of us has been taken with their death as well,” Christine Feldmann said.

“This paper represented everything great about this country: democracy and community. And to think someone would try to stop that and murder five innocent people is just horrific and makes me feel very hopeless, unfortunately.”

She placed flowers on the memorial in a commercial area dotted with retail stores, restaurants and a lingering police presence following the shooting.

On Thursday, a gunman armed with a shotgun and smoke grenades blasted through the door of the Capital Gazette, then killed four journalists and a sales assistant.

The suspect has been identified as Jarrod Ramos, who had a long-standing grudge against the paper over a 2011 article about a criminal harassment case brought against him by a former high school classmate. AFP