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Shooting in Texas: "Everyone was laughing" at Salvador Ramos, isolated teenager who became a killer

2022-05-26T19:06:12.564Z


An 18-year-old young man at odds with his family, irritable, withdrawn, a fan of shooting games... Nothing, however, suggested that his


Three days after the Robb Elementary School shooting, the small Texas town of Uvalde remains in shock.

White crosses adorned with flowers and bearing the names of the 19 students and their two teachers murdered have been erected at the entrance to the establishment and, instead of celebrating the end of classes joyfully, the families organize the funerals of the victims.

Every day brings new revelations about the author of the massacre, Salvador Ramos, 18, shot dead by a policeman at the scene of his carnage.

Who was he really, this pale-skinned teenager, this troubled and isolated youngster who had been skipping high school for a few months?

“He could be aggressive when he was angry, conceded his mother, Adriana Reyes, in a brief interview with ABC, but he was not a monster.

Sometimes though, I had a funny feeling, I wondered what was happening to him.

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Scarifications on the face, "for fun"

Neighbors told local papers that he frequently argued with his mother, an observation corroborated by Jeremiah Munoz, four years his senior, and with whom he regularly played consoles, "Fortnite" and "Call of Duty". specifically.

“I heard him during our games on Xbox arguing with her, she yelled at him, she told him that he had to go to school and that he was not doing anything with his life.

And Salvador insulted him copiously…”

When the arguments were particularly violent, "he would go to his grandmother's house, Munoz told the New York Times, and he would spend more and more time there".

It was this same grandmother who was Ramos' first victim on Tuesday, May 24.

Although seriously injured in the head, she managed to alert the police.

VIDEO.

Texas school shooting: Uvalde mourns his dead children during a night vigil

Another fellow video gamer, Santos Valdez, claims they were friends in primary school but Ramos had changed as teenagers and they no longer saw each other.

"One day he stopped at the park where I was playing basketball," he told the Washington Post.

He had long hair and his face was full of cuts.

First he explained to me that a cat had scratched him but then he told me the truth and that he had cut his face with a knife again and again and again.

I asked him:

But why are you doing this?

You're crazy ?

To amuse

me, he answered me”.

Valdez also claims to have seen Ramos in the evenings throwing eggs at people or shooting them with a pellet gun from a car.

He had announced his act on Instagram

His cousin Mia told The Washington Post that Ramos was not a social person and had become withdrawn over the years.

"At school, people made fun of him for stuttering and lisping," she said.

“Everyone was making fun of him,” confirms Stephen Garcia, his best friend in sixth grade, “everywhere, on social networks, in video games.

Yet he was very nice, very shy, he would have had to come out of his shell.

Garcia recalls posting a photo on Instagram of himself with eyeliner around his eyes.

"It triggered a lot of insults against homosexuals," he recalls.

Salvador Ramos is gradually dropping out of high school but in the evening, until last month, he worked at Wendy's, one of the fast food restaurants in Uvalde, a town with a strong Hispanic majority.

Adrian Mendez, his boss describes him as "a quiet boy, a guy who didn't talk much and who stayed in his corner, very different from my other employees".

Read alsoMass killing in a Texas school: at the heart of the American nightmare

If he seems to be cutting ties with his friends in real life, he is developing his presence on social networks, with a preference for the Yubo application, still according to his friend Garcia.

Users of this platform can hang out in live streaming rooms like on Tinder, the Washington Post explains, and virtually meet other users there.

But it's on Instagram that he will post photos of his guns and it's there that he tags a young girl he has never met but who will receive the messages announcing the shooting, less than a year. half an hour before the carnage.

Police under fire

A troubled, isolated teenager, in conflict with his parents, certainly, but nothing seemed to predict such a murderous madness, agree to say all those who knew him.

And apparently, even at school, Ramos had never seen a psychologist.

In the meantime, the controversy swells on the slowness of the intervention of the police.

Indeed, almost an hour passed between the moment the killer entered the school and the moment he was shot.

"An almost incomprehensible delay," said Andrew McCabe, a former senior FBI official on CNN.

In a video taken the day of the shooting, parents can be seen begging the many police officers present to intervene as gunshots are heard inside the school.

"There were at least 40 police or military armed to the teeth, but they did nothing until it was much too late," said Jacinto Cazares, the father of victim Jackie Cazares, 10. years, at the Washington Post "There were six or seven fathers who wanted to enter the school to save our babies, they prevented us from passing".

A witness described the heartbreaking scene to the New York Times: “The fathers were asking the police to give them their bulletproof vests, they said they wanted to enter the school, but they refused.

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Source: leparis

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