In a matter of hours, Robb Elementary’s little aspiring lawyers, cops, dancers, and biologists would run into the student who dropped out of high school with two AR-15-style rifles and hundreds of ammunition he legally bought for on his 18th birthday a week earlier. .
At 11:33 a.m., Ramos entered the school, unobstructed, through a back door that a teacher had left open. He fired more than 100 cartridges at the school and two adjoining classrooms. A Border Patrol tactical team shot him dead more than an hour after the terror began.
Distressed parents planned funerals while boiling over the delayed response. Law enforcement officers for days offered contradictory explanations. A public safety department colonel admitted Friday that waiting in the school hallway while trapped students were making 911 calls was the commander’s “wrong decision” at the scene. It is unclear how many lives the mistake may have cost.
The nearly 16,000 inhabitants of Uvalde, mostly Latinos, are now the last of the bad guys in a strange American tragedy.
“It was something I don’t want to see again.” a county without a forensic doctor. “These are our children.”
‘Just wait for it’
Ramos, who had no criminal record, had few friends and was largely kept to himself. In the weeks leading up to the massacre, he showed a dark side to the live broadcasts of the social networking app Yubo. Several users who witnessed the recent videos said he told the girls he would rape them, showed them a rifle he had bought and threatened to shoot them in schools. They haven’t taken it seriously so far.
At around 11am on Tuesday, he called a 15-year-old girl in Germany. She had befriended him earlier this month on the social media app.
The young man and teenager from Frankfurt spoke daily on FaceTime. They also communicated with Yubo and played and chatted on the Plato game app. He was curious about life in Germany. He confessed to spending a lot of time alone at home.
“She seemed happy and comfortable talking to me,” said the girl, whose mother gave her permission to be interviewed.
Still, some talk alarmed her. He admitted to throwing dead cats into houses. And he never mentioned plans to meet friends.
In videos and text messages, Ramos talked about visiting his new friend in Europe. One message included a flight itinerary.
“I’m coming soon,” he wrote.
On Monday, Ramos told the girl he had received a package of bullets that expanded as he entered the fabric.
Because? she asked.
“Just wait for him,” he said ominously.
The next day, on the call shortly after 11 a.m. the shootings, he told the girl he loved her.
Screenshots of messages Ramos sent shortly after the call show that she complained that her grandmother had contacted AT&T about “my phone.”
“It’s annoying,” he wrote.
At 11:06 a creepy message came in: “I just shot my grandmother in the head.”
His last text message to his new friend online was at 11:21 local time, then in the early hours of the evening in Germany: “I’m going to shoot” at an elementary school.
A gunman opens fire and then enters the school
With days left in the school year, Robb’s sophomore and fourth graders picked up their prizes on Tuesday morning.
The children smiled and took pictures. Students watched Disney’s “Lilo & Stitch” during the waning days of a long semester.
Less than a mile away, Ramos, after shooting his 66-year-old grandmother and sending a final text message to his German friend, drove a van to the school campus and crashed the truck into a race. It was 11:28 local time.
He opened fire on two people outside a funeral home across the street but did not hit them. Her grandmother managed to call 911. She was flown to a San Antonio hospital and is expected to survive.
Derek Gonzalez was near the school when he heard the shot.
“Shoot! Shoot!” he recalled a woman screaming outside as bullets hit the ground.
Within minutes, Ramos headed from the road to the school parking lot and started firing at the classroom windows. Moments before opening the back door without locking the building, a school security guard in a patrol car drove right next to the gunman, who had crouched behind a car.
At 11:33 a.m., Ramos moved down a hallway and into one of two adjoining classrooms: 111 and 112. At no point since the truck crashed did the police confront him.
Minutes later, seven officers arrived at the school. Three officers approached the locked classroom where the gunman had now been barricaded. Two officers were shot from behind a door and injured.
A more than 100-round bombardment echoed through the corridors of Robb Elementary in the first minutes of the massacre. It was at least the 30th school shooting at a K-12 school this year.
He said “good night,” then shot the teacher
Miah Cerrillo, 11, was watching the Disney movie with her classmates. Alerted by a shooter in the building, teachers Eva Mireles and Irma Garcia moved to protect their young officers. When a teacher tried to close the classroom door, the gunman shot through the door window.
The teacher stepped back and the gunman followed her. He said “Good night,” then shot her. He turned and opened fire on the other teacher and Miah’s classmates.
The girl cried sometimes and wrapped herself in a blanket as she remembered the horror. He heard screams and more gunfire as the gunman entered a connected classroom. Between rounds, the shooter played music that Miah described as “sad, as if you wanted people to die.”
Miah feared he would return for her and a few surviving friends. He covered his hands with the blood of a murdered classmate next to him and smeared them. She was killed.
At one point, Miah and a classmate managed to use her dead teacher’s phone to call 911.
“Come on, please,” he told the dispatcher. “We’re in trouble.”
Commander makes “wrong decision”
By the time students started making 911 calls, as many as 19 police officers had already covered themselves in the hallway at 12:03 p.m. They took no action and waited for the classroom keys and tactical equipment.
At 12:16 p.m., a girl who made several calls to 911 told an dispatcher that eight or nine children were alive in her classroom.
“The commander at the scene at the time believed that he had gone from an active shooter to a barricaded subject,” Colonel Steven McCraw of the Texas Department of Homeland Security (DPS) said Friday, describing the call not to confront the shooter as “the wrong decision, period.”
“There is no excuse for that,” he added.
The official who made the decision not to break the classroom was the school district police chief Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, who has not spoken publicly since two brief press statements on the day of the shootings. He has three decades of law enforcement experience. There was no response to attempts to reach Arredondo at his home on Friday.
Before the end of noon on Tuesday, at least 10 calls were made to 911 from the classrooms, including several from the same girl asking for help. He whispered at one point that several bodies surrounded him in room 112.
Amerie Jo Garza turned 10 weeks before the attack. He received his first mobile phone as a gift. Classmates later told her stepfather, Medical Assistant Angel Garza, that she had been killed while trying to call 911.
“I was just trying to call the authorities,” Angel Garza said, sobbing as she took a photo of Amerie with a certificate of honor.
“I just want people to know that he died trying to save his comrades.”
The chaos spread outside the school
During the siege, some responding officers helped evacuate students and teachers from other parts of the school.
Frustrated parents gathered outside during the riot. They urged the detainees to storm the school to stop the bloodshed.
One of the parents, Víctor Luna, begged the agents to give him his equipment. His son Jayden survived the shooting, but did not know at the time.
Luna and other parents watched nervously as officers escorted students from the school. The video of the scene showed that the agents physically contained some parents.
Throughout the night, distressed families gathered at the SSGT’s Willie de Leon Civic Center, where buses delivered survivors. DNA samples were collected from the parents to confirm if their children were among the victims.
As the death toll rose, relatives who spent hours watching others reunite with their sons and daughters marched away from the makeshift reunion center.
Doctors treat “destructive wounds”
AR-15 rounds hit the heart of a small town.
Among the victims were Xavier and Lexi, the honor roll students. Like teachers Mireles and Garcia, who had been teaching together for five years. Two days after Garcia’s death, her husband, Joe, suffered a fatal heart attack. His relatives said he died with a broken heart.
Other young victims were José Flores Jr., 10, and Eliana “Ellie” Garcia, who was 9. Nevaeh Alyssa Bravo was 10. Jacklyn Jaylen Cazares, 10, was killed along with her cousin and classmate Annabell Guadalupe Rodríguez, 10 years old. .
There was 10-year-old Mcenna Lee Elrod; Uzziah Garcia, 10; Jayce Carmel Luevanos, 10; Tess Marie Matthew, 10; Maranda Mathis, 11; Alithia Ramirez, 10; Maite Rodriguez, 10; Layla Salazar, 11; Jailah Nicole Silguero, 10; Eliahana ‘Elijah’ Cross Towers, 10; and Roger Torres,
Nearly 20 people were injured in the attack with a rifle used in some of the most notorious and deadly massacres in recent history.
The AR-15 style rifle was designed to maximize its killing rate by dragging enemy soldiers with high-speed rounds. The original designers explained that the speed of the impact causes the bullet to fall after it penetrates the tissue. The result: catastrophic injuries.
“We were treating destructive wounds and what that means is that large areas of tissue were missing in the body,” said Dr. Lillian Liao, …