UVALDE, Texas (AP) — The gunman who massacred 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Texas had warned on social media minutes before the attack that he had shot his grandmother and going to shoot up a school, the governor said Wednesday.
Salvador Ramos, 18, used an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle in the bloodbath Tuesday at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. He had legally bought two such rifles just days before the attack, soon after his 18th birthday, authorities said.
About 30 minutes before the bloodbath, Ramos made three social media posts, Gov. Gregg Abbot said. According to the governor, Ramos posted that he was going to shoot his grandmother, then that he had shot the woman, and finally that he was going to shoot up an elementary school.
Abbott said Ramos, a resident of the community about 85 miles west of San Antonio, had no known criminal or mental health history.
Seventeen people were also injured in the attack.
“Evil swept across Uvalde yesterday. Anyone who shoots his grandmother in the face has to have evil in his heart,” Abbott said at a news conference. “But it is far more evil for someone to gun down little kids. It is intolerable and it is unacceptable for us to have in the state anybody who would kill little kids in our schools.”
Democrat Beto O’Rourke, who is running against Abbott for governor this year, interrupted the news conference, calling the Republican’s response to the tragedy “predictable.” O’Rourke was escorted out while members of the crowd yelled at him, with one man calling him a “sick son of a bitch.”
As details of the latest mass killing to rock the U.S. emerged, grief engulfed the small town of Uvalde, population 16,000.
The dead included an outgoing 10-year-old, Eliahna Garcia, who loved to sing, dance and play basketball; a fellow fourth grader, Xavier Javier Lopez, who had been eagerly awaiting a summer of swimming; and a teacher, Eva Mireles, with 17 years’ experience whose husband is an officer with the school district’s police department.
“I just don’t know how people can sell that type of a gun to a kid 18 years old,” Eliahna’s aunt, Siria Arizmendi, said angrily through tears. “What is he going to use it for but for that purpose?”
Lt. Christopher Olivarez of the Texas Department of Public Safety told CNN that all of those killed were in the same fourth-grade classroom.
The killer “barricaded himself by locking the door and just started shooting children and teachers that were inside that classroom,” Olivarez said. “It just shows you the complete evil of the shooter.”
Law enforcement officers eventually broke into the classroom and killed the gunman. Police and others responding to the attack also went around breaking windows at the school to enable students and teachers to escape.
Investigators did not immediately disclose a motive. But in chilling posts on social media in the days and hours before the massacre, an account that appeared to belong to Ramos displayed photos of his guns and seemed to indicate something was going to happen.
The attack in the predominantly Latino town of Uvalde was the deadliest school shooting in the U.S. since a gunman killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012.
