The gunman who slaughtered 19 kids and two teachers at a Texas elementary school reportedly exhibited increasingly bizarre behavior leading up to the rampage; including cutting up his face with knives just “for fun,” friends said.
Salvador Ramos’ friend Santos Valdez Jr., 18, said the two had been close, playing video games and basketball regularly, until his friend’s behavior began to deteriorate.
At one point, he recounted, Ramos showed up at a park with scratch marks across his face and said he had been attacked by a cat.
“Then he told me the truth, that he’d cut up his face with knives over and over and over,” Valdez said.
“I was like, ‘You’re crazy, bro, why would you do that?’” he said. Ramos told him it was just “for fun,” Valdez said.
At school, he told classmates he cut himself “because I like how it looks,” a student said.
Valdez said he last interacted with Ramos just two hours before the attack at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.
The two messaged on Instagram, where Valdez reshared a meme that said, “WHY TF IS SCHOOL STILL OPEN?” Ramos replied, “Facts” and “That’s good tho right?”
Valdez reportedly wrote: “Idek [I don’t even know] I don’t even go to school lmao.”
But Ramos never responded to the message or even opened it, he said.
Valdez also described how Ramos used to drive around with another pal and shoot people at random with a BB gun and also egged people’s cars.
He said Ramos last year posted on social media images of automatic rifles that “he would have on his wish list” and a few days ago, he posted photos of two rifles he referred to as “my gun pics,” the paper reported.
Friends and relatives also said Ramos had been bullied throughout middle school for a speech impediment, a stutter and lisp.
His cousin Mia said she saw students mocking his impediment during middle school, where he tried at first to ignore the bullying but then told his grandmother that he didn’t want to go back to school.
“He wasn’t very much of a social person after being bullied for the stutter,” said Mia, who declined to provide her last name. “I think he just didn’t feel comfortable anymore at school.”
Childhood friend Stephen Garcia told the paper that Ramos “would get bullied hard, like bullied by a lot of people. Over social media, over gaming, over everything.
“He was the nicest kid, the most shiest kid. He just needed to break out of his shell,” he said, adding that Ramos was once subjected to homophobic slurs after posting a photo of himself wearing black eyeliner.
Garcia said he tried to defend his friend before moving with his mother to another part of the state for her job.
“He posted videos on his Instagram where the cops were there and he’d call his mom a b—- and say she wanted to kick him out,” she told the paper. “He’d be screaming and talking to his mom really aggressively.”
Ramos’ neighbor Ruben Flores, 41, said he tried to be a kind of father figure to the troubled teen, who had “a pretty rough life with his mom.”
He told the paper he saw police at the Hood Street home, where he witnessed blowups between the two.
Flores and several other people familiar with the family said Ramos’ mother used drugs, which contributed to the trouble at home.
Ramos moved to his grandmother’s home across town a few months ago, according to Flores, who said he last saw the grandmother Sunday when she stopped by the mom’s Hood Street property, which she also owned.
He said she told him she was in the process of evicting Ramos’ mother because of her drug issues.
Ramos allegedly shot his grandmother before heading over to Robb Elementary School in Uvalde with two assault rifles around 11:32 a.m. local time Tuesday.
Meanwhile, new details also have been reported about Ramos’ behavior at a local Wendy’s, where he worked from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. or 5 p.m. five days a week.
Adrian Mendes, the evening manager at the fast-food joint, told CNN that he “kept to himself mostly.”
“He felt like the quiet type, the one who doesn’t say much. He didn’t really socialize with the other employees,” Mendes said. “He just worked, got paid, and came in to get his check.”
A young woman who worked with him until March noticed an aggressive streak.
“He would be very rude towards the girls sometimes, and one of the cooks, threatening them by asking, ‘Do you know who I am?’ And he would also send inappropriate texts to the ladies,” the former co-worker said on condition of anonymity.
“At the park, there’d be videos of him trying to fight people with boxing gloves. He’d take them around with him,” she said.
Yarelli Vasquez, who used to work with Ramos at Whataburger, told KSAT he was typically quiet but it was “kind of common” for him to make aggressive comments.
“He was very quiet… didn’t really have a lot of friends, so he kept to himself a lot of the time,” she told the outlet.
“I remember an interaction we had with this couple that worked there … he told the boyfriend that he wanted to fight his girlfriend for no reason.”
She said the incident never escalated but it was “still weird.”
Classmates told the outlet they had similar interactions.Crystal Foutz, 17, said Ramos would be “aggressive for no reason” and he used to post videos online that showed him with guns and knives, or boxing and training for fights.
While Ramos did exhibit “eerie” behavior, classmates were shocked to see him become murderous.
“Like this still doesn’t feel real. It feels like I’m in a dream, like till this entire day,” said Keanna Baxter, 17.
The shooters grandfather, Rolando Reyes, 72, said he wasn’t aware that his grandson had purchased two rifles at a gun shop in town and while he agreed that Ramos was quiet, he didn’t appear violent.
Meanwhile, a photo of two AR-15-style rifles appeared on an Instagram account linked to Ramos just three days before the massacre.
His TikTok page has only a single post of a mobile game, yet the bio under his profile image reads: “Kids be scared irl” — an acronym for “in real life.”
Just hours before the bloodbath, Ramos cryptically messaged a stranger: “I’m about to.”
The Instagram account with the username “salv8dor_” contained photos of guns and selfies. It was taken down after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott released his name.
The account’s single grid post features three photos — a mirror selfie of Ramos in a sweatshirt, a grainy black-and-white closeup of his face, and a first-person shot of a person holding a firearm magazine in their lap.
The same account shared a photo of two rifles lying side by side to its Stories. The account tagged another user in the photo.
That user, @epnupues, said Ramos was a total stranger who tagged her in the gun photo and messaged her that he “got a lil secret.”
The Instagram user, who said she doesn’t live in Texas, questioned why he tagged her in the pic of the rifles and said she found it scary that he tagged her.
“You gonna repost my gun pics,” @sal8dor_ direct messaged the girl on May 12.
“what your guns gotta do with me,” she replied on Friday.
“Just wanted to tag you,” he said back.
Then at 5:43 a.m. Tuesday, @salv8dor_ messaged her: “I’m about to.”
The girl asked “about to what” to which he replied, “I’ll tell you before 11.”
He said he’d text her in an hour and urged her to respond.
“I got a lil secret I wanna tell u,” he messaged with a smiley-face emoji covering its mouth.
He never told the girl his secret. His last message at 9:16 a.m. was “Ima air out.”
It is so sad when, many times, after such
an horrendous mass shootings of innocent
children; you later learn that the killer
had problems at home or was harassed
and bullied at school. I think this bullying at schools should be reported to the school officials
and the offenders should be disciplined.
Also, I agree all schools should have an
experienced guard at the main entrance to
the school and he should, definitely, carry a gun.
A perpetrator would think twice before attempting
to enter a school if he knows or sees a guard
on the premises.
This kid sounds like he had chronic lead poisoning. It usually crosses the blood-brain barrier prior to 3 1/2 years old, about when it closes. The first signs are unusual irritability and fighting as a child, even though he wants to be a nice person , also can have inability to get to sleep on time and to stay asleep. By this time the lead and possible other heavy metal will have left his blood stream and permanently lodged in his brain. The only non-invasive way to assess for these toxins that I know of is to have a hair sample, cut close to the scalp, and sent for analysis for toxins. It’s a pity that society and the AMA usually look for social reasons for bad behavior, when the real culprit may be physiological and can be curable. This has happened in my family.