E.B. Furgurson III, a reporter who, after five of his colleagues at the Maryland newspaper The Capital were massacred in their newsroom by a grudge-fueled gunman, helped produce the next day’s issue from his pickup truck, died on Nov. 25 in Annapolis, Md. He was 70.
His wife, Rebecca (Bisgood) Furgurson, said his death, in a hospital, was caused by an “extended illness.”
On June 28, 2018, Mr. Furgurson — who, like his father, also a journalist, was known as Pat — had gone for lunch at the food court at the Westfield Annapolis Mall, across the street from the newspaper, when he received a text about the shootings, which killed four of his fellow journalists, Rob Hiaasen, Wendi Winters, John McNamara and Gerald Fischman, and Rebecca Smith, a sales assistant.
The gunman, Jarrod W. Ramos, had held a grudge against the paper for publishing an article in 2011 about his guilty plea in a harassment case. In 2021, he was sentenced to six consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole, one for each of the five people he killed and one for attempted murder.
Mr. Furgurson quickly left the food court and, in the mall’s garage, turned the back of his pickup truck into a makeshift work space that he shared with a photographer, Josh McKerrow, and a reporter, Chase Cook.
While Mr. Furgurson made telephone calls and talked to the police, he became a calming influence to an anxious Mr. McKerrow.
“He was just doing what you’re supposed to do,” Mr. McKerrow said in an interview with The Baltimore Sun for its obituary of Mr. Furgurson. “It was really inspiring to me, and I just said, ‘OK, I’ll just do what Pat’s doing. I’ll follow Pat’s lead,’ and he really helped me get through the day.”
Mr. Furgurson played a mentoring role at The Capital, which shared its newsroom with The Maryland Gazette. (The two papers merged in January to form The Capital Gazette under a new owner, David D. Smith, executive chairman of the Sinclair network of television stations, who also bought The Sun in the transaction.)
“He was just someone everyone could talk to,” Rick Hutzell, a former editor of The Capital, said in a phone interview. “And because he came to journalism late, in his 40s, he had a bank of experiences outside of journalism. For a lot of people who were in their first or second journalism job, he was a valuable sounding board.”
As the day ended, Mr. Furgurson became, for a short time, the center of attention for some members of the news media.
“People in there were just trying to do a job for the public,” he told them. “Something like this might happen in Afghanistan or Iraq or something like that, but you don’t expect it to happen in a little sleepy office across from the local mall.”
But, he added: “We’re still putting out a newspaper. You’ll see it in the morning.”
“5 Shot Dead at The Capital,” read the headline of an article with 10 bylines, including Mr. Furgurson’s.
Ernest Baker Furgurson III was born on Nov. 2, 1954, in San Diego. His father, Ernest Jr., was a foreign correspondent for The Sun and the son of a printer at the paper who also wrote four books about the Civil War. His mother, Mary Louise (Stallings) Furgurson, was a real estate agent. The family spent three years in Moscow, the elder Mr. Furgurson’s base when he covered Europe.
While attending Davis & Elkins College in Elkins, W. Va., he accumulated some journalism experience, as an intern at The Sun and The Associated Press in 1976 and as a reporter at The Inter-Mountain, a paper in Elkins, in 1979.
After graduating in 1980 with a bachelor’s degree in history, he began working as a chef in restaurants in West Virginia and Maryland, purchasing director at a hotel in Annapolis and a chef for a public television cooking show.
His father recalled in an interview that he had been “wandering around, trying to decide what to do,” when friends steered him into restaurant work.
While Mr. Furgurson was working as a cook at a restaurant in Annapolis, a customer who had a question about the meal asked him about his background. The customer was Tom Marquardt, then The Capital’s managing editor, who was intrigued when Mr. Furgurson told him about his father’s career and asked if he had thought of going into journalism.
“He seemed like someone who could tell a story,” Mr. Marquardt said by phone. “I wasn’t sure he could write, but I said, ‘Stop by the office.’ When we sat down, it confirmed for me that he had a personality that would work well in journalism. I decided to take a chance on him.”
After Mr. Furgurson was hired in the late 1990s, his beats included Maryland’s rural South County, the environment and culture. In 1999 he earned a second bachelor’s degree, in interdisciplinary studies, from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Mr. Hutzell, now a columnist for The Baltimore Banner, said that Mr. Furgurson was “never the person who was on the hot story,” but rather that he “did the day-in and day-out stuff that makes newspapers so important.”
But he was in the middle of the paper’s most important news story, one that earned it a Pulitzer Prize citation for its “courageous response to the largest killing of journalists in U.S. history.” In 2018, when Time magazine collectively named several journalists “Person of the Year,” he was among the 14 Capital staffers who posed on one of the magazine’s four covers.
He remained with the paper until 2020, when he took a buyout from its owner, Tribune Publishing, which several months later announced it would be closing newsrooms in Annapolis and at four other newspapers.
In addition to his wife and his father, Mr. Furgurson is survived by his son, Jesse; his sister, Glyn Furgurson Pogue; and his stepmother, Cassie Furgurson.
Mr. Furgurson spoke at a vigil the day after the newsroom killings.
“For a moment yesterday, the sword was mightier,” he told the crowd of about 200 people. “But this morning, we put out a newspaper. And we’ll put out a newspaper tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day.”
He added: “We’ll continue to do our bit to provide real news to better inform citizens in this republic. We are not the enemy. We are you.”
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