The father of the 18-year-old gunman who killed 21 people at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, wants the world to know this week.
In an interview with The Daily Beast on Thursday, Salvador Ramos said: “I just want people to know that I’m sorry, man. [for] what my son did. ”
“I never expected my son to do such a thing,” added Ramos, 42. “I should have killed myself, you know, instead of doing something like that to someone.”
His son, also named Salvador, shot his grandmother in the face on Tuesday and drove away, before throwing the truck into a ditch outside Robb Elementary and opening fire on a fourth-grade classroom. . The teenager, whose attack claimed the lives of at least 19 young children and two adults, was killed at the scene.
It was the deadliest school shooting in the United States in nearly a decade.
Ramos said he was at work on the day of the shooting and only found out when his own mother called to tell him. Panicked, she started calling the local jail to ask if her son was there.
Eventually, the finding sank.
“They killed my little man,” he said.
He added: “I will never see my son again, just as they will never see their children. And that hurts me.”
The Daily Beast spoke to Ramos on the porch of his girlfriend’s house east of Uvalde, where he has lived for several years. The house and bushes outside were adorned with blue and white streamers for a senior graduate. Sometimes the hard-spoken Texan started to cry.
The details of his son’s attack were appalling: according to authorities, he bought two rifles and 375 rounds of ammunition before the massacre and barricaded himself in the classroom for more than an hour. One student recalled saying to the children in the classroom, “It’s time to die.”
Despite the horrific massacre he carried out on Tuesday, Ramos insisted his son was “a good person” who “hooked himself”. He said he had no idea why his son became so violent, or why he chose to go to school.
But he said he noticed a change in his son in recent months: a pair of boxing gloves he had bought and started trying on at a local park. “I said, ‘Mijo, one day someone will kick you,'” Ramos recalled. “I started to see different changes in him like that.”
Young Ramos reportedly had a bad relationship with his mother and had dropped out of high school before graduating this year. His father admitted that he had not spent much time with him lately because he was working outside Uvalde — digging holes around the poles for inspection — and because of the pandemic.
Her own mother was suffering from cancer, Ramos said, and she could not risk being exposed to the coronavirus. He added that his son was frustrated with COVID’s precautions about a month ago and refused to talk to him. Ramos hasn’t seen him since.
“My mom tells me she probably would have shot me too, because she would always say I didn’t love her,” she told The Daily Beast.
Ramos also blamed the boy’s mother, Adriana Reyes, for not buying him more school supplies and clothes. He said his son was harassed at school for wearing the same high water jeans every day and that was the reason he dropped out. Attempts to reach Reyes for comment this week were unsuccessful.
Former classmates and families confirmed that young Ramos had been harassed in high school by a speech impediment. But some former co-workers and others who knew him said Ramos had an aggressive streak, and his story on the Internet pointed to someone too happy to fall to brag about guns and massive bloodshed.
A high school classmate told the Washington Post that she had seen Ramos engage in multiple fist-fighting fights, and a former co-worker told The Daily Beast that he was inclined to harass the women he worked with.
“I don’t think he was necessarily harassed,” classmate Nadia Reyes told the newspaper. “He would take things too far, say something that shouldn’t be said, and then put himself in defense mode.”
For his part, the father has a long criminal record that includes at least one conviction for assault and bodily harm to a relative. He said he was currently away from his daughter, the gunman’s sister, whom he also said was upset with him for not spending enough time with family.
The 21-year-old sister joined the Navy and no longer lives in her home.
“My daughter, I guess, changed her life, she went to the Navy,” he said. “I wish my son had gone and changed his life.”
Ramos said his son often complained about his maternal grandmother, who was in the hospital recovering from her injuries this week. He said he offered to let his son move with his own parents, but that the teenager declined, citing the lack of WiFi. (The teen’s last dispute with his maternal grandmother before he shot her was according to his phone bill.)
He said his son had a girlfriend in San Antonio, whom he and his family had visited, but did not comment further on the teen’s social life, which his classmates had been rapidly declining. .
He added that he spoke because “I want my son’s story.”
“I don’t want to be called a monster … they don’t know anything, man,” he said. “They don’t know anything about what was going on.”
—With reports by Emily Shugerman, William Bredderman and Justin Rohrlich