The Uvalde, Texas, gunman gave off so many warning signs that he was obsessed with violence and notoriety in the months leading up to the attack that teens who knew him began calling him “school shooter.”
He was once bullied as a fourth-grader in one of the same classrooms where he killed 19 children and two teachers. And in the planning for the May 24 massacre, he collected articles about the Buffalo, New York, supermarket shooting and played video games with a young student while quizzing him about the school schedule.
A state investigative report that highlighted law enforcement’s bungled response to the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School has also provided the most in-depth account to date about missed red flags and possible motivations surrounding 18-year-old Salvador Ramos. Despite many warning signs, he still managed to legally amass more than $5,000 in guns, ammunition and gear in the weeks leading up to the killings.
Just days before the attack, Ramos spoke out on social media of his plans to do something that would “put him all over the news.” He wrote of a desire to kill himself, shared online videos of beheadings and violent sex, and sent footage of himself driving around with “someone he met on the internet” holding a plastic bag containing a dead cat and pointing BB guns at people out the window.
“The attacker became focused on achieving notoriety,” according the interim report released Sunday by an investigative panel of the Texas House of Representatives. “He believed his TikTok and YouTube channels would be successful. The small number of views he received led him to tell those with whom he interacted that he was ‘famous,’ that they were mere ‘randoms’ by comparison.”
The 77-page report — based on interviews with family members, testimony and data from Ramos’ phone — lays out a long trail of missed signals prior to the massacre but notes these clues were known only to “private individuals” and not reported to authorities. It also found Ramos had no known ideological or political views that would have made his rantings more widely known.
The report traces the descent of a shy, quiet boy once thought by a teacher as a “wonderful student” with a “positive attitude” into a mass murderer who gave plenty of signs online and to family members that he was prone to violence as he amassed an arsenal of rifles, body armor and ammunition.
A former girlfriend told the FBI that she believed Ramos had been sexually assaulted by one of his mother’s boyfriends at an early age, the report said, but when Ramos told his mother at the time, she didn’t believe him.
Without assigning a specific motive, the report noted that Ramos talked about painful fourth-grade memories to an acquaintance weeks before the shooting.
Family members told investigators how Ramos had been bullied as a fourth-grader in one of the same linked classrooms where he carried out the attack. They said he faced ridicule over his stutter, short hair and for wearing the same clothing nearly every day.
At one point, the report said, a fellow student tied his shoelaces together and Ramos fell on his face, injuring himself. The report noted that Ramos was flagged by school officials as “at risk,” but never received any special education services.
Failing grades soon were accompanied by frequent absences — more than 100 a year beginning in 2018. The report noted it was unclear if a school resource officer ever visited Ramos’ home. Uvalde High School officials involuntarily withdrew him last fall, when he had only completed the ninth grade. That was about the same time he moved out of his mother’s house and began living with his grandmother, just blocks from the elementary school.
Months before the shooting, Ramos began contacting acquaintances with “vague but ominous messages” about doing something soon.
In March 2022, two months before the shooting, a student on Instagram told him that “people at school talk (expletive) about you and call you school shooter.”
The next month Ramos asked in a direct message on Instagram, “Are you still gonna remember me in 50 something days?” After the answer — “probably not” — Ramos replied, “Hmm alright we’ll see in may.“
Crystal Foutz, who attended school with Ramos, told The Associated Press he was frequently angry and gave off “vibes” like he could shoot up the place, though it was taken more as joke than serious.
“You heard people joke and say, ‘He looks like a school shooter,’” said Foutz, though she quickly added, “I’ve heard it said about other people.”
Ramos took jobs at two fast-food restaurants to save money for what he told acquaintances was “something big,” which family members assumed was his own apartment or car. Instead it was guns and bullets, which he tried to get two people to buy for him while he was 17 and unable to obtain legally.
But on May 16, the gunman turned 18, and began purchasing firearms and ammunition, persuading an uncle to drive him to a gun store. He eventually spent more than $5,000 on two AR-style rifles, ammunition and other gear. And with no criminal history or even arrest, Ramos passed all background checks.
He had earlier written online “10 more days,” eliciting speculation from readers that he was planning to “shoot up a school or something” or commit “mass murder.” A friend told him that an acquaintance was “telling everyone u shooting up the school.”
He also spent time playing the children’s videogame Roblox with his cousin’s son, a student at the Robb Elementary, and “elicited from him details about his schedule and how lunch periods worked at the school.”
“I got a lil secret,” Ramos wrote on Snapchat to a German teenager he had befriended days before the May 24 shooting, adding that first he was waiting for something “being delivered” on Monday. His order of 1,740 hollow-point bullets that expand in bodies upon impact, more easily killing, arrived later that day.
“None of his online behavior was ever reported to law enforcement,” the report said, “and if it was reported by other users to any social media platform, it does not appear that actions were taken to restrict his access or to report him to authorities as a threat.”
Shortly before entering Robb Elementary, the gunman reached out to the German teenager he had befriended earlier, posting a message that he had just shot his grandmother in the face and was about to “shoot up” an elementary school.
Not sure he was serious, the German teenager replied: “Cool.”
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Condon reported from New York. AP reporter Jim Mustian in New York contributed to this report.
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More on the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas: https://apnews.com/hub/school-shootings
Frequent lockdowns may have contributed to Uvalde tragedy
UVALDE, Texas (AP) — Teachers and students at Robb Elementary School knew the safety protocols when an 18-year-old with an AR-15 style rifle entered the building in May. Dozens of times in the previous four months alone, the campus had gone into lockdown or issued security alerts.
Not because of active shooter scares — because of nearby, often high-speed pursuits of migrants coming from the U.S.-Mexico border.
An entire generation of students in America has grown up simulating lockdowns for active shooters, or worse, experiencing the real thing. But in South Texas, another unique kind of classroom lockdown occurs along the state’s 1,200-mile southern border: hunkering down because Border Patrol agents or state police are chasing migrants who are trying to evade apprehension.
The frequency of lockdowns and security alerts in Uvalde — nearly 50 between February and May alone, according to school officials — are now viewed by investigators as one of the tragic contributors to how a gunman was able to walk into a fourth-grade classroom unobstructed and slaughter 19 children and two teachers. Although a slow and bungled police responseremains the main failure, a damning new report by the Texas House says recurring lockdowns in Uvalde created a “diminished sense of vigilance.”
With a new school year now just weeks away in heavily patrolled South Texas, there are worries the lockdowns will resume and deepen the trauma for scarred students in Uvalde, as migrant crossings remain high and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott continues expanding a massive border security operation.
“That’s what it probably was, just complacency, because it does happen on a frequent basis,” said Uvalde County Justice of the Peace Eulalio “Lalo” Diaz Jr., who had to identify the bodies of the dead at Robb Elementary.
The new findings that a culture of lockdowns in Uvalde played some role in the failures on May 24 reflects how one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history intersected with immigration policies and thousands of Border Patrol agents, National Guard members and state police assigned to apprehend migrants and stop drug traffickers. Of the nearly 400 law enforcement officers at the scene of Robb Elementary, more than half were Border Patrol agents or state police, according to the report.
On Tuesday, over the span of just 20 minutes, eight state police vehicles and Border Patrol SUVs cruised through Uvalde’s central square, less than a mile from Robb Elementary.
Uvalde is about an hour’s drive from the border with Mexico, located at the crossroads of two major state highways. Nearby are the cities of Pearsall, Dilley and Karnes – all of which have immigration detention centers with some of the nation’s highest populations. More than 4,500 detainees in total were at the three facilities as of June 2022, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
Jazmin Cazares, whose 9-year-old sister Jacklyn was among the students killed, told Texas lawmakers in June that no one in the school district took lockdowns seriously “until that day.” She said she is now terrified to return for her senior year in the fall.
“Am I going to survive it? Unbelievable,” Cazares said.
Even the first officers on scene at Robb Elementary wondered whether the threat was a so-called “bailout” — the term used by law enforcement along the border to describe suspected migrants or drug traffickers who have fled. Pete Arrendondo, the embattled Uvalde school police chief who has become the target of angry demands by parents to resign or be fired, told the House committee the thought crossed his mind since it happens so often.
The gunman entered Robb Elementary at 11:33 a.m. One minute earlier, according to the report, a fourth-grade teacher in Room 105 received a lockdown alert and made sure her classroom door was locked. That teacher also told the committee she saw a teacher across the hall locking the door in Room 112, one of two adjoining rooms where the shooting occurred.
The shooter is believed to have entered the classroom through Room 111, which was known to have trouble locking properly.
The signal the school’s alert system sends out does not specify the potential threat. And because of the prevalence of lockdowns in recent months, according to the report, many teachers and administrators “assumed it was another bailout.”
“Bailouts” has become an increasingly common part of Uvalde’s vernacular in the last year as the area has become extraordinarily busy with migrants crossing illegally, largely from countries outside Mexico and northern Central America.
The Border Patrol sector based in Del Rio, Texas – one of nine along the Mexican border – was the most transited corridor for illegal crossings in June, replacing Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. For much of the year, the two South Texas sectors have posted similar numbers of border encounters, well ahead of the others in California, Arizona, New Mexico and West Texas.
While many migrants turn themselves in to the Border Patrol in the border towns of Del Rio and Eagle Pass – each about an hour’s drive from Uvalde – many seek to elude capture for hours or days, hiding in “stash houses” or in tall fields of corn and other crops for smugglers to pick them up at a previously agreed location for the drive to San Antonio.
The committee report said there had been no incidents of “bailout-related” violence on Uvalde school campuses before the shooting. High-speed driving sometimes crossed school parking lots, according to the report, which also said some pursuits involved firearms in surrounding neighborhoods.
Diaz, the Uvalde justice of the peace, serves as a magistrate when police make arrests in the area as part of the governor’s massive border mobilization known as Operation Lone Star. He sets bail for people taken into custody for alleged human or drug smuggling, but also for crimes unrelated to national security, like minor drug charges.
He said Abbott’s operation hasn’t made Uvalde safer.
“These people who are coming through don’t want to be in Uvalde,” said Diaz. “They are looking to get away from the border and we’re too close.”
Over the last decade, many police departments have shifted away from having officers engage in car chases because they are a danger to the public. A 2017 report from the Justice Department found that between 1996 and 2015 police pursuits killed an average of 355 people annually, with nearly a third of those killed in vehicles not involved in the chases.
Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin, who said he has not spoken to Abbott for nearly a month, has called on the governor to do even more on the border to curb migrant crossings. With classes set to re-start in less than two months, he worries about “the bailouts by the schools and so forth” and said “it needs to stop.”
Angie Villescaz, who grew up in Uvalde and after the shooting founded the Latina mothers advocacy group Fierce Madres with local moms, said the border rhetoric is a distraction from the most pressing issue.
“They’ve always wanted to keep the narrative about securing the border,” Villescaz said, “and now they can’t because it’s about securing our schools.”
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Coronado reported from Austin, Texas. Associated Press writer Paul J. Weber in Austin, Texas, contributed to this report.
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More on the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas: https://apnews.com/hub/uvalde-school-shooting