Texas school shooter Salvador Ramos made his deadly intentions plain in a series of Facebook messages he posted Tuesday shortly before killing 19 children and two adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.
Ramos, who was killed in a shootout with law enforcement, started writing “approximately 30 minutes before reaching the school,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said Wednesday, according to the New York Post.
“The first post … said, ‘I’m going to shoot my grandmother.’ The second post was, ‘I shot my grandmother,’” Abbott said.
The 18-year-old shot his grandmother, Celia Gonzales, in the face before he headed to the school. She was hospitalized in stable condition, according to ABC News.
“The third post, maybe less than 15 minutes before arriving at the school was, ‘I’m going to shoot an elementary school,’” Abbott said.
A spokesman for Facebook’s parent company, Meta, said the “messages Gov. Abbott described were private one-to-one text messages that were discovered after the terrible tragedy occurred.”
“We are closely cooperating with law enforcement in their ongoing investigation,” spokesman Andy Stone tweeted.
The messages Gov. Abbott described were private one-to-one text messages that were discovered after the terrible tragedy occurred. We are closely cooperating with law enforcement in their ongoing investigation.
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) May 25, 2022
According to reports in The New York Times and CNN, the messages were sent to a 15-year-old girl in Germany who had met Ramos using an online app called Yubo.
The Times reported that the girl, whose name was given as Cece, read the messages and was “curious” about whether Ramos meant what he said.
She later contacted authorities after learning of the shooting. The teenager said she regrets waiting.
“Maybe I could’ve changed the outcome,” she said. “I just could never guess that he’d actually do this.”
The CNN report said screenshots it reviewed and an interview with the girl indicated Ramos was angry with his grandmother because of a dispute about his phone bill.
“Ima do something to her rn [right now],” he wrote, later calling his grandmother a vulgar name.
“She’s on the phone with AT&T [about] my phone. … It’s annoying,” Ramos posted.
Moments later, he posted that he had shot her.
On Monday, Ramos told the 15-year-old he had “received a package of ammunition” with bullets that “would expand when they struck somebody,” CNN reported.
When she asked what he planned to do, he said he had a surprise and to “just wait for it.”
CNN reported that 20 minutes before the text saying he shot his grandmother, he called the girl, who lives in Frankfurt, and told her he loved her.
She said they often chatted by video.
“He looked happy and comfortable talking to me,” the girl said, but she noted that she was alarmed when he told her he “threw dead cats at people’s houses.”
Ramos had also left behind odd messages on Instagram.
“I’m about to,” he said in a message to another Instagram user, the New York Post reported.
Before Instagram took down his account, it featured a single post consisting of three images: a mirror selfie of Ramos wearing a sweatshirt, a close-up of his face and a picture of someone with a gun magazine on his lap.
“I’m about to,” he wrote at around 5:43 a.m. Tuesday.
When asked “about to what,” Ramos answered, “I’ll tell you before 11.”
“I got a lil secret I wanna tell u,” he wrote, not saying what the secret was.
“Ima air out” was Ramos’ last message.
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