School shooter left trail of warning signs
The Uvalde, Texas, gunman gave off so many warning signs that he was obsessed with violence and notoriety in the months leading up to the attack that teens who knew him began calling him "school shooter."
He was once bullied as a fourth-grader in one of the same classrooms where he killed 19 children and two teachers. And in the planning for the May 24 massacre, he collected articles about the Buffalo, New York, supermarket shooting and played video games with a young student while quizzing him about the school schedule.
A state investigative report that highlighted law enforcement's bungled response to the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School has also provided the most in-depth account to date about missed red flags and possible motivations surrounding 18-year-old Salvador Ramos. Despite many warning signs, he still managed to legally amass more than $5,000 in guns, ammunition and gear in the weeks leading up to the killings.
Just days before the attack, Ramos spoke out on social media of his plans to do something that would "put him all over the news." He wrote of a desire to kill himself, shared online videos of beheadings and violent sex, and sent footage of himself driving around with "someone he met on the internet" holding a plastic bag containing a dead cat and pointing BB guns at people out the window.
"The attacker became focused on achieving notoriety," according the interim report released Sunday by an investigative panel of the Texas House of Representatives. "He believed his TikTok and YouTube channels would be successful. The small number of views he received led him to tell those with whom he interacted that he was 'famous,' that they were mere 'randoms' by comparison."
The 77-page report — based on interviews with family members, testimony and data from Ramos' phone — lays out a long trail of missed signals prior to the massacre but notes these clues were known only to "private individuals" and not reported to authorities. It also found Ramos had no known ideological or political views that would have made his rantings more widely known.
The report traces the descent of a shy, quiet boy once thought by a teacher as a "wonderful student" with a "positive attitude" into a mass murderer who gave plenty of signs online and to family members that he was prone to violence as he amassed an arsenal of rifles, body armor and ammunition.
A former girlfriend told the FBI that she believed Ramos had been sexually assaulted by one of his mother's boyfriends at an early age, the report said, but when Ramos told his mother at the time, she didn't believe him.
Without assigning a specific motive, the report noted that Ramos talked about painful fourth-grade memories to an acquaintance weeks before the shooting.
Family members told investigators how Ramos had been bullied as a fourth-grader in one of the same linked classrooms where he carried out the attack. They said he faced ridicule over his stutter, short hair and for wearing the same clothing nearly every day.