18-year-old Salvador Ramos was shot and killed by responding officers on Tuesday, 24 May, after he carried out unbridled gun violence at an elementary school in Texas, taking lives of at least 19 children and several adults.
Ramos was subsequently identified to be a resident of a community located around 135 kilometers west of San Antonio.
Hours before the massacre on Tuesday, an Instagram account (@salv8dor_), reportedly run by Ramos, sent cryptic direct messages to a user in California.
The account, which featured photos of semi-automatic firearms, was deleted from the social media website after law enforcement agencies made the identity of the assailant public.
‘Quiet’, ‘Kept to Himself’: What His Co-Workers Said
Speaking to The New York Times, a local Wendy’s manager informed the daily that Ramos had worked at the fast food joint for a year, and quit a month ago.
The manager indicated that he “went out of the way to keep by himself”, saying that he wasn’t friendly with the other staff.
“No one really knew him,” he added.
Another anonymous co-worker also corroborated this, saying that Ramos was often quiet and ‘did not socialize much’.
She added, “at the park, there’d be videos of him trying to fight people with boxing gloves. He’d take them around with him,” Daily Beat quoted.
On the day of the shooting, @salv8dor_ messaged her around 5 in the morning and said: ‘I’m about to’. When the girl tried to enquire about what he was going to do, he responded, ‘I’ll tell you before 11.’
‘I got a lil secret I wanna tell u,’ Ramos allegedly told the girl in another message.
Tuesday’s attack reportedly began around a little before noon. His final message on Tuesday read, ‘Ima air out’.
On 12 May, Ramos had posted a photo of two rifles and tagged the same woman. In her stories on Tuesday, the user claimed that she barely knew Ramos, but had been randomly tagged by him in photos of guns before.
Ramos’s Instagram account had also asked the woman to be “grateful he tagged her”.
In a statement on Tuesday, the woman reportedly indicated that she had informed the police of her conversations with Ramos.
“I’m so sorry for the victims and their families I really don’t know what to say…The only reason I responded to him was because I was afraid of him I wish I stayed awake to at least try to convince him to not commit his crime. I didn’t know,” she added on her story.
What Happened on Tuesday
The violence occurred before noon on Tuesday, in the small town of Uvalde. Speaking to CNN, Sgt Erick Estrada of the Texas Department of Public Safety, indicated that the gunman, donning a body armour, crashed his vehicle outside the premises before heading inside.
“He shot and killed, horrifically and incomprehensibly,” Texas Governor Greg Abbott said at a press conference after the attack.
As per the governor, the 18-year-old reportedly gunned down his grandmother with two military-style rifles before reaching the school on Tuesday morning.
(With inputs from Daily Beat, Daily Mail, The New York Times and The New York Post.)
