WWALDE, Texas (AP) – On Monday morning at Robb Elementary School, a number of maroons in brown hats and dresses visited the children to offer smiles, high fives and encouragement that one day, if they study hard enough, they too could graduate. .
Particularly absent from these high school graduates in Uwalde was 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, who often skipped classes and was not ready to graduate. The next day, he shot his grandmother and then went to school alone with an AR-style rifle and fatally shot 19 children and two teachers for reasons that authorities still cannot explain.
State police say Ramos has no criminal record, no history of treating mental illness and no obvious signs of being dangerous to this cohesive, predominantly Latin American community 85 miles west of San Antonio.
But those who knew him saw growing signs of isolation, outbursts and aggression. There were also a series of mysterious messages on social media – including apparently random teenagers in Germany and California – offering pictures of rifles, ammunition and hints of his desire to hurt and kill.
“He always seems to pour his anger on the most innocent person in the room,” said 17-year-old Crystal Foote, who attends school with Ramos and works with him at the Whataburger fast food chain. “He will be angry with people who think it’s not good. He’s just always been super weird. “
The most chilling was a series of messages on the social platform Yubo just before Tuesday’s shooting, which may have come too late to prevent violence. Investigators are investigating texts they believe Ramos was sent to a 15-year-old German girl, including a minute before the massacre, with a warning that he was about to “shoot a primary school”, according to a law enforcement official who is not authorized to discuss the question he spoke to the Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
Instagram photos posted under his pseudonym TheBiggestOpp show him in front of a mirror taking selfies and one of the weapons magazines on his lap.
Earlier this month, Ramos tagged a photo of two long rifles of an Instagram user with more than 10,000 followers and asked her to share the photo.
“I barely know you and you’re tagging me in a picture with a gun,” said an Instagram user, a young woman from California. “It’s just scary.”
On May 17, the day after he turned 18, he visited a gun shop to buy an AR-style rifle. He bought a second a few days later.
On the day of the shooting, Ramos said he had “a little secret”, according to an exchange of public announcements. He later wrote, “I’m on my way.”
A TikTok account with the same selfie photo and username included a freezing line in their profile: “Kids Be Afraid of IRL”, abbreviated to “in real life”.
Neighbors and classmates say Ramos has repeatedly quarreled with his mother in recent years, including when police were called.
Some say the seeds of Ramos’ descent into mass murder may have begun many years ago as a child who always had trouble fitting in with others, was occasionally targeted by hooligans, and then turned into one.
A childhood friend recalled a time when Ramos admitted to cutting his face with knives for fun. The same friend Santos Valdes Jr., 18, told The Washington Post that Ramos would drive around at night, angering cars and shooting at random people with a BB gun. About a year ago, he said, Ramos posted a “wish list” on social networks for automatic rifles.
Fuchs, a former classmate, said Ramos has been retiring more and more in recent months after “slowly deviating” from school and getting into an angry argument with her ex-boyfriend and couple at Whataburger.
“He was not a big man,” she told the AP. “He just had that ego. It was as if he was invincible. “
“He really was a loner and the people he interacted with stopped hanging out with him because of these things,” she said.
On the morning of the shooting, 82-year-old Gilbert Gallegos, who lives across the street from Ramos and his grandmother, heard a gunshot while walking in his yard. He ran ahead and saw Ramos drive away, his grandmother, bloodied, coming to him, begging for help.
Ramos ‘grandmother appeared covered in blood: “She says,’ Berto, here’s what he did. He shot me. ”
Minutes later, Ramos crashed his truck into a drainage ditch near the school and launched an attack that would last more than an hour before he was finally shot dead by authorities.
Fuchs said that unlike other mass gunmen who showed no sign of their intentions, Ramos was sending signals that needed to be captured.
“Looking at it now, it’s a textbook,” she said. “It could have been prevented. It had to be prevented. “
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Condon and Mustian reported from New York. AP authors Acacia Coronado in Uvalde, Michael Balsamo and Amanda Seitz in Washington, DC, and news researcher Ronda Schaffner of New York contributed to the report.
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Contact the AP’s global investigation team at Investigative@ap.org.
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