Keanna Baxter turned down the arrival of the “stranger” Salvador Ramos after seeing a friend who went out with him get scared of his volatile companion at Uvalde High School.
“He went out with my ex-boyfriend. And then they broke up,” Baxter, 17, told the San Antonio Express News. “And then he tried to date me, but I told him no. Because he always had this kind of weird feeling about him.”
Ramos, 18, killed 19 elementary students and two teachers on Tuesday when he broke into Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in the deadliest school shooting in the United States since 2012.
Ramos was unpredictable and violent when he was dating his friend, Baxter said.
“He told me he was scared,” Baxter said. “As if she was going to get super violent. And when he lost his temper, she was literally scared for his life, basically.
“I was sending him these very nasty messages, where he would go from super sweet to calling his back to super sweet.”
“He was generally aggressive, like violent,” Baxter added. “I would try to fight women. I would try to fight anyone who told me no; if I didn’t get it right, I would go crazy. I was especially violent with women.”
The villains gather at a memorial in Uvalde Town Square after the mass shooting. James Keivom for NY Post
One of these women was Crystal Foutz, 17, also a high school student in Uvalde.
Ramos threatened to hurt her in comments on Instagram, after she quarreled on social media with her ex-boyfriend.
The children run to a safe place during the mass shooting at Robb Elementary. Pete Luna / Uvalde Leader-News via REUTERS
“It was just harassment. And I’ve never liked to provoke him or anything like that,” Foutz said Friday. “He was aggressive for no reason. … I just blocked him.”
Salvador Ramos was killed by police after the furor.salv8dor_ / Instagram
Foutz also learned that Ramos was harassing his ex-girlfriend after separating.
“Another friend of mine, when I was working with (Ramos), there was an incident between a girl and a boy: (Ramos) tried to fight the girl,” Foutz told Express News. “And it really didn’t end there. Just because he was so aggressive.”
This is not the first time his contemporaries have described Ramos’ volatile behavior.
Santos Valdez Jr., 18, said they were close until the future gunman got off the rails. Ramos showed up one day at a park where they played basketball with cuts on their faces. At first he told Valdez that his cat had scratched him, and then he revealed the truth: he had been bitten “just for fun.”
There is a video circulating of Ramos holding a dead cat in the seat of a car, Baxter said. Foutz said he saw videos of TikTok that Ramos posted about himself hitting the walls while wearing boxing gloves and stating that he could fight anyone.
Ramos posted about his weapons on social media.salv8dor_ / Instagram
“He was very aggressive,” Foutz recalled. “If you ask for something or if he’s trying to hook you up or trying to tell you something and you don’t give him any reaction, I’d upset him … (He was) very insistent, very aggressive.”
Rumors circulating among high school students say Ramos was angry because he could not graduate. Reports have said he dropped out of high school, but Baxter saw him at school last month. Foutz recalled seeing him on campus last fall.
“To be honest, I didn’t think twice about this kid,” Baxter said. “I met this kid almost a year ago. He came out of nowhere.”
The two girls said Ramos was a “loner” without “no friends.”
“People who tried to give him a chance to be friends scared them,” Foutz said. “He was a stalker, really. If you didn’t give him what he wanted, he was a stalker for you.”
“I had no friends,” Baxter said. “To be honest, no one ever spoke to him. Just because people were really scared of him.”
A police officer shows a graph showing the route Ramos took to Robb.EPA Elementary School
In fact, some students thought that if there was a goal for such tragedies, it would be high school.
“We all thought they might do it in high school, because we’ve received threats before,” he said. “But not the children. We should have been us. There was no reason to go and hurt those children.
The FBI searches the home of Salvador Ramos. Kevin C. Downs for the NY Post
“It simply came to our notice then. None of us have that kind of hatred in our hearts to do such a thing or know how this could have happened. “