It was a one quiet day, nothing out of the ordinary, until Salvador Ramos came.
The Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, the United States, mourned after the 18-year-old Ramos fatally shot nineteen students and two teachers, and wounded seventeen other people.
It all began a day earlier, when Ramos shot his grandmother in the head at home, severely wounding her. This happened when Ramos and the 66-year-old woman had an argument over a phone bill.
After that, Ramos took his grandmother's Ford pickup truck and drove it to the Robb Elementary School. Ramos crashed the vehicle through a barricade and into a concrete ditch outside the school
Ramos came equipped with a type of tactical vest over his black clothing, a backpack, an AR-15 style rifle and seven 30-round magazines.
Leaving the vehicle unattended, he remained outside for about five minutes, before entering the main building.
He then locked himself inside, killed many and wounded the rest, and remained inside for about an hour before the police barged in.
It is said that many of the students and teachers played dead while the shooting took place.
Among them, students were said using the blood of their dead classmates, smearing themselves with the blood to give credence to the subterfuge.
When the officers entered the building, it was Ramos who fired his weapon to one of the first officers he saw.
This caused the remaining officers to return fire, and eventually took cover.
Ramos was outnumbered, but he was still overpowering them, since her was using an assault rifle. Because the first responding officers were unable to enter the classroom, and that they wanted to first convince Ramos by negotiating.
This was enough to buy enough time to bring in the U.S. Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC).
When BORTAC agents arrived and entered the building, they were followed by Border Patrol Search, Trauma, and Rescue agent (BORSTAR), and at least one sheriff's deputy.
Ramos reportedly opened fire at the group from a closet in one of the classrooms, before officials returned fire and fatally shot him.
Ramos' case was the third-deadliest American school shooting, after the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007 and the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, and the deadliest in Texas.
While people focused on the incident at the school, what many people didn't know is that, Ramos logged in into his Facebook account, and then posted three posts in the 30 minutes leading up to his attack.
"I'm going to shoot my grandmother," Ramos' first post said.
"I shot my grandmother," his second post said a few minutes later.
"I'm going to shoot an elementary school," his third post said, shared 15 minutes before the shooting.
Ramos' grandmother, Celia "Sally" Martinez Gonzales, was in critical condition after being shot in the face.
According to the second cousin of injured grandmother, the bullet went into Sally's jaw, and had shattered her teeth. She was fortunate because if the bullet went a bit higher, it would have blown her head off.
The three posts were sent to a 15-year-old girl from Germany whom he had met online prior to the shooting. According to a spokesperson for Meta, the parent company of Facebook, the posts were "private one-to-one text messages," and were only realized after the shooting took place.
The timeline of events in which the massacre unfolded, suggests that it spanned about two hours, since the first time Ramos posted his first post on Facebook, until the time he was shot dead.
Salvador Ramos was born in 2004, a resident of Uvalde and a former student at Uvalde High School.
Without any criminal record or any documented mental issues, Ramos was a victim of bullies, and had frequent fights with his classmates. Ramos was scheduled to finish high school in 2022, but his frequent absences made his graduation unlikely, and this eventually led to him being dropped out of his school.
On social media, it is said that he openly abused animals, like cats, and would livestream the abuse. Ramos also made threats about kidnapping and raping girls, as well as threatening to commit a school shooting.
Before he was killed, Ramos was an employee at a local Wendy's and had been working there for at least a year.
Two months prior to the shooting, Ramos posted a video of himself on Instagram arguing with his mother, Adriana Martínez Reyes, and called her a "bitch".
The weapons Ramos used, was legally purchased a Smith & Wesson assault-style semi-automatic rifle he bought from a local gun store on May 17, 2022, a day after his 18th birthday, and another rifle he bought three days later. Ramos also bought the AR-15 style rifle from a Georgia-based online retailer Daniel Defense eight days before the shooting.
As for the ammunitions, Ramps bought 1,657 total rounds of ammunition.
At the Texas school massacre, a total of 315 rounds were found inside the school, consisting of 142 spent cartridges, 173 unfired bullets, and an additional 922 rounds were found on school property outside the building.
"Forgive me, forgive my son, I know he has his reasons," said Reyes. "He was very quiet, very quiet. He didn’t bother anyone, he didn’t do anything to anyone."
"I just want the people to know I’m sorry man, [for] what my son did," Ramos' father, Salvados Ramos Sr. said. "I never expected my son to do something like that, He should’ve just killed me, you know, instead of doing something like that to someone."
"I don't like weapons. I cannot be around weapons," said grandfather Rolando Reyes. "I hate when I see all the news, all those people that get shot."
Reyes also said he has a criminal background and isn't allowed to own a weapon. If ever he knew his grandson has possessed firearms, he would have reported it to the authorities, Reyes added.
Adriana Martínez Reyes described her son as "not a monster" but admitted that he could "be aggressive".
