Uvalde shooter considered ‘motivated thinker and learner’ before dark turn saw him kicked out of high school, records reveal
School officials in Uvalde, Texas, have released a trove of new files on the devastating mass shooting at Robb Elementary School on May 24 2022 that saw 19 children and two teachers shot dead.
The release by the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District comes after a years-long legal battle over public access to the material, which includes, among its 1,500 pages, emails between top district officials, text messages to and from police officers at the scene and records on the shooter, Salvador Ramos.
Ramos was just 18 when he carried out one of the deadliest classroom attacks in U.S. history and the documents reveal that, in kindergarten, he was considered a “motivated thinker and learner,” “a remarkable little boy,” and “a very hard worker.”
By middle school, however, his reputation had slumped and he was suspended or written up on multiple occasions amid instances of harassment and bullying and because of his sub-standard academic performance.
Ramos finally abandoned his education in October 2021, seven months prior to the shooting over “poor academic performance, lack of attendance” and consistently poor grades in all classes.
The new file disclosure is only the latest on the atrocity and the portrait of Ramos it offers aligns with a Texas House report from three years that said the gunman had “turned down a dark path” before the attack and became increasingly isolated after leaving school, also noting that he was bullied over his lisp, poverty and chaotic family life.
Last year, city officials in Uvalde also released police body cam videos and recordings of 911 calls.
The documents also contain the personnel file of former Uvalde schools police chief Pete Arredondo, who was the on-scene commander of the law enforcement response, which has been much-criticized over the prolonged hesitation before officers were sent in to tackle Ramos.
Around 376 officers waited for approximately 77 minutes before confronting the gunman in a classroom filled with dead and wounded children and teachers.
Multiple federal and state investigations into the response have since laid bare cascading problems in law enforcement training, communication, leadership and technology and questioned whether officers prioritized their own lives over those of children and teachers.
Arredondo and fellow school district officer Adrian Gonzales were the only two officers to face criminal charges over the slow response and the new release contains a handful of text exchanges between the men sent before the shooting.
One at 9.04am, sees the chief telling Officer Gonzales to “go hang out at the park with the seniors until 11.30.”
At 11.40am, a text to Arredondo from a district secretary noted someone reported hearing shots outside Robb Elementary. “They went ahead and locked themselves down,” the message read.
At 1.07pm another text sent to him asked if any students were injured or taken to the hospital and asked if the district can lift the “secure status” on the school. The shooter had been killed by law enforcement about 15 minutes earlier.
Among the files was a message of support for Arredondo, who was subsequently fired, from a bereaved parent who wrote: “The officers who responded did what they could with the information that they had at the time and the resources they had available to them.
“This is similar to Vietnam veterans returning home from the war to be met with protests of people calling them.”
Another harrowing inclusion among the files is an email sent by fourth-grade teacher Lynn Deming, who was inside Robb Elementary when the attack was under way, who told superintendent Hal Harrell that surviving staff members felt ignored by the district in its aftermath.
“I got to hear about the future of the school I love through a press conference,” Deming wrote, going on to describe shepherding students inside from recess when the gunshots erupted, only for bullets to come flying “through my windows.”
Deming remembered lying in front of her students to try to block them from gunfire and said: “I knew I would die that day. I had shrapnel in my back from when he had shot in my window, I had blood all over the back of me, but I tried to stay calm for my students.
“I needed my students to hear that they were loved in case it was the last thing they ever heard.”
The final release of the files by the UCISD comes after media organizations, including the Associated Press, sued the district and county in 2022 to secure them, which came to pass after a Texas appeals court in July upheld a lower court’s ruling that the records must be made public.
Additional reporting by agencies.
