Salvador Ramos, 18, often stayed in his room on Hood Street, where he would repeatedly hit a punching bag by himself, his mother’s boyfriend Manuel Alvarez told DailyMail.com.
Speaking from the front porch of the three-bedroom house at the end of the dirt road, he said ‘Salvador was a loner.’
‘He didn’t have many friends. Occasionally a “friend” came over,’ he continued, but noted the last time he saw he saw a friend over at the house was about six months ago.
Neighbors and classmates say Ramos’ behavior began to spiral into the bizarre and macabre as he entered his later teenage years, with one friend telling Good Morning America: ‘He had scars on his face and someone asked him, ‘Are you ok?’ and he just said with a smile ‘I did it myself, I liked how it looked.’
He began dressing in dark clothes and military boots and used his BB gun to target random people, one local claimed.
There are around 15,000 residents in Uvalde which sits roughly 80 miles west of San Antonio, around an hour’s drive from the US-Mexico border.
He moved to the area recently – after growing up in North Dakota, Texas State Senator Roland Gutierrez said in a local television interview.
Salvador Ramos, 18, was reportedly bullied at school for his clothing and because his family was poor, a ‘close’ friend said
Manuel Alvarez, 62, the boyfriend of Salvador’s mother, Adriana, spoke exclusively with DailyMail.com
He described Ramos as a ‘loner’ who liked to hit the punching bag in his room
Alvarez, 62, told DailyMail.com that he is shocked that Ramos went on to kill 19 children at the Robb Elementary School in the second-deadliest shooting in the United States, following only the infamous Sandy Hook massacre in 2012 – which saw 26 people killed.
‘I never expected him to do what he did. He’s quiet and kept to himself most of the time. I really only had a handful of conversations with him,’ Alvarez said.
‘He stayed to himself; I really didn’t have a relationship with him. He didn’t talk much, he was a loner.’
He said his bedroom was unassuming, a ‘punching bag’ he liked hitting, a TV and a bed in it.
Alvarez also told the DailyMail.com he wasn’t allowed to let anyone in the house, and noted that about two months ago Ramos and his mother got into an argument over some wi-fi issue, but ‘I’m not exactly sure what it was about, I stay out of it.’
Following the argument, Alvarez said, Ramos packed his belongings and moved in with his grandmother, Celia Gonzalez, a few miles away.
The last time Alvarez said he saw Ramos was a week ago when he stopped by their house to pick up some pizza. ‘He was on good terms with his mother as far as I know,’ he said.
Alvarez wasn’t sure the relationship status he has with his biological father, Salvador, ‘he lives in the area, but I don’t know anything about him.’
He said Adriana Reyes, Ramos’ mother, is now at her mother’s bedside at a hospital in San Antonio.
Ramos shot his grandmother, Celia Gonzalez before he went on his shooting rampage that left 21 dead. She is now undergoing surgery, and Reyes said he believes she will survive.
Gonzalez was reportedly in the process of evicting the mother over her drug use in the days before Tuesday’s killing spree, and on the morning of the shooting, one neighbor told local news channel Newsy that he witnessed Ramos arguing with Gonzalez claiming he was ‘angry that he did not graduate’.
However, it has since been revealed that the suspect and his grandmother were fighting about a cellphone bill, although it was described as a ‘minor argument’.
After Ramos opened fire, his grandmother screamed: ‘He shot me, he shot me’, before Ramos ‘zoomed down the street’ and crashed his pick-up truck before embarking on his killing spree – which happened to take place just one day after his colleagues had graduated.
Four days before the shooting, Ramos reportedly sent his friend pictures of his guns and ammunition. When asked why he had it, Ramos allegedly replied: ‘Don’t worry about it’
His social media was filled with new rifles, which he purchased on his 18th birthday
Ramos grew up in Hood Street before moving to his grandmother’s house some months ago, neighbors claimed
Ramos’ last known address, his grandmother’s residence, is seen taped off by police as they carry out searches
Ramos grew up on Hood Street (pictured), in a no-frills working class neighborhood, where homes are dotted along avenues more akin to dirt tracks, and where more than a third live at or barely above the federal poverty line.
He had recently gotten a job at the local Wendy’s (pictured), where co-workers say he sent inappropriate text messages to his female colleagues
Ramos is the son of Salvador Ramos, 42, and Adriana Martinez Reyes, 39 – both of whom have a criminal history, DailyMail.com can confirm.
Salvador Sr. has a criminal history going back to 2000, when a Texas Court report shows he was sentenced to 180 days in jail for an unspecified misdemeanor – and was ordered to pay $875 at Uvalde County Court.
He then committed another misdemeanor just one month later and was ordered to pay another $375.
Two years later, on July 29, 2002 he was again arrested for an assault that causes bodily injury against a family member, according to public records. He was again sent to prison for 180 days.
By April 2011, Ramos again faced charges – this time for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and possession of marijuana,
Neighbors say Ramos’ relationship with his mother was also not great.
According to Ramos’ neighbor Ruben Flores, 41, the shooter and his mother would often have screaming matches, with police being called to the home on multiple occasions.
In since deleted Instagram videos, Ramos had allegedly filmed his mother interacting with police.
Classmate Nadia Reyes claimed: ‘He’d call his mom a b***h and say she wanted to kick him out… He’d be screaming and talking to his mom really aggressively.’
Flores, meanwhile, told the Washington Post how he had tried to be a father figure to Ramos but that the situation at home only worsened as he got older.
Jeremiah Munoz, an alumnus from the local high school who used to play Xbox games with Ramos, also told the New York Times he would often hear him arguing with his mother through the microphone – and his mother would scream back at him, telling him he needed to go to school and he was doing nothing with his life.
Munoz said Ramos would often leave his mother’s house and stay with his grandmother for several days after a big fight – and over the past year he has been spending more and more time with his grandmother.
Ramos’ grandmother, who owned the house on Hood Street, was reportedly in the process of evicting the mother over her drug use in the days before Tuesday’s killing spree. Flores said Ramos had moved into his grandmother’s home across town some months earlier.
There, his grandfather, Ronaldo Reyes, 72, said he lived in a front room and slept on a mattress on the floor. Reyes told ABC News he had no idea his grandson purchased two AR-15s nor that he kept them in the house.
As a convicted felon, Reyes is not allowed to have guns inside his home, he said, and if he knew Ramos was keeping weapons there he said he would have turned in his grandson.
‘I hate when I see the news, all those people that get shot, I’m against all that,’ Reyes said. ‘I say, “Why do they let these people buy guns and all that? Those stupid – whatever they shoot.”‘
But, Reyes said, he did not think his grandson was dangerous, noting that he had tried to encourage his grandson to attend school, but he would just shrug in response.
‘These kids these days think they know everything,’ he said.
Now, Reyes said he is shocked and does not understand how his grandson could have committed such a heinous crime – saying he did not know how to drive and did not have a drivers’ license.
He also wondered how his grandson would have purchased the weapons, or if he was trained on how to use them.
By all accounts, Ramos (pictured) had been a relatively normal child until the eighth grade, with his ‘best friend’ from that period, Stephen Garcia, branding him the ‘nicest’ and ‘shyest kid’ who ‘just needed to break out of his shell.’
Ramos moved to his grandmother’s home (pictured), after arguing his mother repeatedly over the years, locals claimed
An Uvalde police car is seen stationed outside the last known address of school shooter Salvador Ramos
But by all accounts, Ramos had been a relatively normal child until the eighth grade, with his ‘best friend’ from that period, Stephen Garcia, branding him the ‘nicest’ and ‘shyest kid’ who ‘just needed to break out of his shell.’
Reportedly Ramos was bullied for a stutter and lisp. Classmates also allegedly called him with gay slurs. At one point, he uploaded a picture of himself wearing eyeliner.
‘He would get bullied hard, like bullied by a lot of people,’ Garcia told the Post, ‘Over social media, over gaming, over everything.’
When Garcia had to move away, Ramos began to change, dressing in all black and donning large military boots.
In his early childhood, friends claim, he had been nicknamed ‘pelon’, meaning bald in Spanish, for his incredibly short hair. But in an apparent bid to leave those days behind, he began to grow it long.
He was then branded an ’emo’ or ‘alternative’ at school, where he got into multiple fist fights before increasingly playing truant.
During the last few months of his life, Ramos was working at a Wendy’s and was hardly in attendance at school. He was not set to graduate this year, a fact he seemed to despise.
He killed 19 kids and two adults at an elementary Robb Elementary School on Tuesday
As he morphed into a ‘different person’ into his later teen years, one local claimed he would ride around at night with a friend firing a BB gun at random passersby. He is also said to have egged people’s cars.
He is said to have found it hard to hold onto friendships, often ‘taking things too far’ with ‘weird’ comments.
One friend, who wanted to join the Marines, said he cut off Ramos after the killer told him he only wanted to join the force ‘so he could kill people.’
A former classmate, who asked not to be identified, also told CNN he and Ramos were somewhat ‘close’ and used to play Xbox together. The killer was a fan of the shooting and combat game Call of Duty.
On his since removed Instagram account, Ramos is believed to have shared a photo of two AR15-style rifles just three days before the massacre, while the bio on his TikTok page chillingly read: ‘Kids be scared irl’ (in real life).
Meanwhile, his Wendy’s co-workers told the Daily Beast that he had an ‘aggressive streak’ and would send inappropriate messages to female employees. They also branded him ‘quiet’ and ‘anti-social’.
One said: ‘He would be very rude towards the girls sometimes, and one of the cooks, threatening them by asking, ‘Do you know who I am?’
‘And he would also send inappropriate texts to the ladies.’
The same source claimed there were multiple videos of Ramos fighting people with boxing gloves at a local park.
‘He’d take them around with him,’ they claimed.
In the hours leading up to the killings, the shooter reportedly showed off his guns to an LA-based woman via his Instagram page, taunting that he was ‘about to do’ something.
One video at the scene appears to show the suspected gunman, named by Governor Greg Abbott as Salvador Ramos, approach the school while what sounds like gunfire is going off in the background
A police vehicle is seen parked near of a truck believed to belong to the suspect behind a shooting at Robb Elementary School
When the woman asked what, he said: ‘I’ll tell you before 11.’ He began shooting at noon.
‘As soon as he made entry into the school he started shooting children, teachers, whoever was in his way, he was shooting everybody,’ Texas Department of Public Safety spokesperson Lt. Chris Olivarez said.
‘This is just evil’, an Uvalde resident told the New York Times, ‘I’m afraid I’m going to know a lot of these kids that were killed.’
Another local, Adolfo Hernandez, told the same paper that his nephew had been in a classroom near where the shooting took place.
‘He actually witnessed his little friend get shot in the face,’ Hernandez said. The friend, he said, ‘got shot in the nose and he just went down, and my nephew was devastated.’
Speaking anonymously, one classmate said Ramos had begun showing up to class less and less as other kids bullied him over his clothes and his family’s financial situation.
‘He would, like, not go to school…and he just, like, slowly dropped out. He barely came to school,’ the friend said.
After the North Dakota native graduated from high school, the friend said they became even more distant from each other, but would occasionally message each other on Xbox.
‘He would message me here and there,’ he said.
Four days prior to Tuesday’s shooting, Ramos reportedly sent his friend a picture of the AR and a backpack full of 5.56 rounds.
‘[He had] probably like seven [magazines],’ he said. ‘I was like: ‘Bro, why do you have this?’ and he was like: ‘Don’t worry about it.”
Law enforcement are seen near the crime scene on Tuesday afternoon after the mass murder at the school
New video from the chaotic scene shows police arriving to the scene with their guns in hand
A woman cries while speaking on the phone outside the Ssgt Willie de Leon Civic Center, where students had been transported from Robb Elementary School to be picked up following the shooting
Under a new Texas law passed in September, those aged 18-21 could buy guns if they had a protective order, because they were at risk of family violence, stalking, prostitution or sex trafficking.
The law also removed the requirement for a permit for a handgun. Rifles were already permitted in Texas without licenses.
In the days leading up to the massacre, Ramos told his friend that he ‘looked very different now.’
‘You wouldn’t recognize me,’ he messaged less than a week ago.
Ramos’s social media was full of photos of his new guns, which he bought on his 18th birthday, state senator Roland Gutierrez said.
Ramos also messaged a Los Angeles-based woman on May 12 on Instagram, tagging her in a photo of the guns.
‘You gonna repost my gun pics,’ @sal8dor_ direct messaged her.
‘What your guns gotta do with me,’ [sic] she replied on Friday.
‘Just wanted to tag you,’ he said back.
Then at 5:43am on Tuesday, @salv8dor_ messaged her and said: ‘I’m about to’.
The girl asked ‘about to what’ to which he answered: ‘I’ll tell you before 11.’
He said he would text her in an hour and urged her to respond.
‘I got a lil secret I wanna tell u,’ he messaged with a smiley face emoji covering its mouth.
‘Be grateful I tagged you,’ he wrote.
She replied: ‘No it’s just scary,’ adding: ‘I barely know you and you tag me in a picture with some guns?’
His last message at 9:16am on Tuesday was ‘Ima air out’.
The shooting started around 11:32am. The woman reacted with horror when she learnt what he had done.
‘He’s a stranger I know nothing about him he decided to tag me in his gun post,’ she wrote.
‘I’m so sorry for the victims and their families I really don’t know what to say.’
She then added: ‘The only reason I responded to him was because I was afraid of him I wish I stayed awake to at least try to convince him to not commit his crime. I didn’t know.’
When an Instagram user asked if she was his girlfriend, she replied: ‘I don’t know him and I don’t even live in Texas.’
He largely dropped out, and took the job at Wendy’s nearby, where co-workers remember him as quiet.
Adrian Mendes, evening manager at the Wendy’s, said Ramos ‘kept to himself mostly.’
‘He felt like the quiet type, the one who doesn’t say much. He didn’t really socialize with the other employees,’ Mendes told CNN.
‘He just worked, got paid, and came in to get his check.’
Mendes said that he did not know Ramos well – he was already employed when Ramos began in February – and didn’t see him most of the time because they were on different shifts.
Ramos worked from 11am to 4pm or 5pm, five days a week for about a year, according to the New York Times. He then quit about one month ago.
Ramos was shot and killed by law enforcement at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, after he had murdered 21 people.
Salvador Ramos, 18, often stayed in his room on Hood Street, where he would repeatedly hit a punching bag by himself, his mother’s boyfriend Manuel Alvarez told DailyMail.com.
Speaking from the front porch of the three-bedroom house at the end of the dirt road, he said ‘Salvador was a loner.’
‘He didn’t have many friends. Occasionally a “friend” came over,’ he continued, but noted the last time he saw he saw a friend over at the house was about six months ago.
Neighbors and classmates say Ramos’ behavior began to spiral into the bizarre and macabre as he entered his later teenage years, with one friend telling Good Morning America: ‘He had scars on his face and someone asked him, ‘Are you ok?’ and he just said with a smile ‘I did it myself, I liked how it looked.’
He began dressing in dark clothes and military boots and used his BB gun to target random people, one local claimed.
There are around 15,000 residents in Uvalde which sits roughly 80 miles west of San Antonio, around an hour’s drive from the US-Mexico border.
He moved to the area recently – after growing up in North Dakota, Texas State Senator Roland Gutierrez said in a local television interview.
Salvador Ramos, 18, was reportedly bullied at school for his clothing and because his family was poor, a ‘close’ friend said
Manuel Alvarez, 62, the boyfriend of Salvador’s mother, Adriana, spoke exclusively with DailyMail.com
He described Ramos as a ‘loner’ who liked to hit the punching bag in his room
Alvarez, 62, told DailyMail.com that he is shocked that Ramos went on to kill 19 children at the Robb Elementary School in the second-deadliest shooting in the United States, following only the infamous Sandy Hook massacre in 2012 – which saw 26 people killed.
‘I never expected him to do what he did. He’s quiet and kept to himself most of the time. I really only had a handful of conversations with him,’ Alvarez said.
‘He stayed to himself; I really didn’t have a relationship with him. He didn’t talk much, he was a loner.’
He said his bedroom was unassuming, a ‘punching bag’ he liked hitting, a TV and a bed in it.
Alvarez also told the DailyMail.com he wasn’t allowed to let anyone in the house, and noted that about two months ago Ramos and his mother got into an argument over some wi-fi issue, but ‘I’m not exactly sure what it was about, I stay out of it.’
Following the argument, Alvarez said, Ramos packed his belongings and moved in with his grandmother, Celia Gonzalez, a few miles away.
The last time Alvarez said he saw Ramos was a week ago when he stopped by their house to pick up some pizza. ‘He was on good terms with his mother as far as I know,’ he said.
Alvarez wasn’t sure the relationship status he has with his biological father, Salvador, ‘he lives in the area, but I don’t know anything about him.’
He said Adriana Reyes, Ramos’ mother, is now at her mother’s bedside at a hospital in San Antonio.
Ramos shot his grandmother, Celia Gonzalez before he went on his shooting rampage that left 21 dead. She is now undergoing surgery, and Reyes said he believes she will survive.
Gonzalez was reportedly in the process of evicting the mother over her drug use in the days before Tuesday’s killing spree, and on the morning of the shooting, one neighbor told local news channel Newsy that he witnessed Ramos arguing with Gonzalez claiming he was ‘angry that he did not graduate’.
However, it has since been revealed that the suspect and his grandmother were fighting about a cellphone bill, although it was described as a ‘minor argument’.
After Ramos opened fire, his grandmother screamed: ‘He shot me, he shot me’, before Ramos ‘zoomed down the street’ and crashed his pick-up truck before embarking on his killing spree – which happened to take place just one day after his colleagues had graduated.
Four days before the shooting, Ramos reportedly sent his friend pictures of his guns and ammunition. When asked why he had it, Ramos allegedly replied: ‘Don’t worry about it’
His social media was filled with new rifles, which he purchased on his 18th birthday
Ramos grew up in Hood Street before moving to his grandmother’s house some months ago, neighbors claimed
Ramos’ last known address, his grandmother’s residence, is seen taped off by police as they carry out searches
Ramos grew up on Hood Street (pictured), in a no-frills working class neighborhood, where homes are dotted along avenues more akin to dirt tracks, and where more than a third live at or barely above the federal poverty line.
He had recently gotten a job at the local Wendy’s (pictured), where co-workers say he sent inappropriate text messages to his female colleagues
Ramos is the son of Salvador Ramos, 42, and Adriana Martinez Reyes, 39 – both of whom have a criminal history, DailyMail.com can confirm.
Salvador Sr. has a criminal history going back to 2000, when a Texas Court report shows he was sentenced to 180 days in jail for an unspecified misdemeanor – and was ordered to pay $875 at Uvalde County Court.
He then committed another misdemeanor just one month later and was ordered to pay another $375.
Two years later, on July 29, 2002 he was again arrested for an assault that causes bodily injury against a family member, according to public records. He was again sent to prison for 180 days.
By April 2011, Ramos again faced charges – this time for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and possession of marijuana,
Neighbors say Ramos’ relationship with his mother was also not great.
According to Ramos’ neighbor Ruben Flores, 41, the shooter and his mother would often have screaming matches, with police being called to the home on multiple occasions.
In since deleted Instagram videos, Ramos had allegedly filmed his mother interacting with police.
Classmate Nadia Reyes claimed: ‘He’d call his mom a b***h and say she wanted to kick him out… He’d be screaming and talking to his mom really aggressively.’
Flores, meanwhile, told the Washington Post how he had tried to be a father figure to Ramos but that the situation at home only worsened as he got older.
Jeremiah Munoz, an alumnus from the local high school who used to play Xbox games with Ramos, also told the New York Times he would often hear him arguing with his mother through the microphone – and his mother would scream back at him, telling him he needed to go to school and he was doing nothing with his life.
Munoz said Ramos would often leave his mother’s house and stay with his grandmother for several days after a big fight – and over the past year he has been spending more and more time with his grandmother.
Ramos’ grandmother, who owned the house on Hood Street, was reportedly in the process of evicting the mother over her drug use in the days before Tuesday’s killing spree. Flores said Ramos had moved into his grandmother’s home across town some months earlier.
There, his grandfather, Ronaldo Reyes, 72, said he lived in a front room and slept on a mattress on the floor. Reyes told ABC News he had no idea his grandson purchased two AR-15s nor that he kept them in the house.
As a convicted felon, Reyes is not allowed to have guns inside his home, he said, and if he knew Ramos was keeping weapons there he said he would have turned in his grandson.
‘I hate when I see the news, all those people that get shot, I’m against all that,’ Reyes said. ‘I say, “Why do they let these people buy guns and all that? Those stupid – whatever they shoot.”‘
But, Reyes said, he did not think his grandson was dangerous, noting that he had tried to encourage his grandson to attend school, but he would just shrug in response.
‘These kids these days think they know everything,’ he said.
Now, Reyes said he is shocked and does not understand how his grandson could have committed such a heinous crime – saying he did not know how to drive and did not have a drivers’ license.
He also wondered how his grandson would have purchased the weapons, or if he was trained on how to use them.
By all accounts, Ramos (pictured) had been a relatively normal child until the eighth grade, with his ‘best friend’ from that period, Stephen Garcia, branding him the ‘nicest’ and ‘shyest kid’ who ‘just needed to break out of his shell.’
Ramos moved to his grandmother’s home (pictured), after arguing his mother repeatedly over the years, locals claimed
An Uvalde police car is seen stationed outside the last known address of school shooter Salvador Ramos
But by all accounts, Ramos had been a relatively normal child until the eighth grade, with his ‘best friend’ from that period, Stephen Garcia, branding him the ‘nicest’ and ‘shyest kid’ who ‘just needed to break out of his shell.’
Reportedly Ramos was bullied for a stutter and lisp. Classmates also allegedly called him with gay slurs. At one point, he uploaded a picture of himself wearing eyeliner.
‘He would get bullied hard, like bullied by a lot of people,’ Garcia told the Post, ‘Over social media, over gaming, over everything.’
When Garcia had to move away, Ramos began to change, dressing in all black and donning large military boots.
In his early childhood, friends claim, he had been nicknamed ‘pelon’, meaning bald in Spanish, for his incredibly short hair. But in an apparent bid to leave those days behind, he began to grow it long.
He was then branded an ’emo’ or ‘alternative’ at school, where he got into multiple fist fights before increasingly playing truant.
During the last few months of his life, Ramos was working at a Wendy’s and was hardly in attendance at school. He was not set to graduate this year, a fact he seemed to despise.
He killed 19 kids and two adults at an elementary Robb Elementary School on Tuesday
As he morphed into a ‘different person’ into his later teen years, one local claimed he would ride around at night with a friend firing a BB gun at random passersby. He is also said to have egged people’s cars.
He is said to have found it hard to hold onto friendships, often ‘taking things too far’ with ‘weird’ comments.
One friend, who wanted to join the Marines, said he cut off Ramos after the killer told him he only wanted to join the force ‘so he could kill people.’
A former classmate, who asked not to be identified, also told CNN he and Ramos were somewhat ‘close’ and used to play Xbox together. The killer was a fan of the shooting and combat game Call of Duty.
On his since removed Instagram account, Ramos is believed to have shared a photo of two AR15-style rifles just three days before the massacre, while the bio on his TikTok page chillingly read: ‘Kids be scared irl’ (in real life).
Meanwhile, his Wendy’s co-workers told the Daily Beast that he had an ‘aggressive streak’ and would send inappropriate messages to female employees. They also branded him ‘quiet’ and ‘anti-social’.
One said: ‘He would be very rude towards the girls sometimes, and one of the cooks, threatening them by asking, ‘Do you know who I am?’
‘And he would also send inappropriate texts to the ladies.’
The same source claimed there were multiple videos of Ramos fighting people with boxing gloves at a local park.
‘He’d take them around with him,’ they claimed.
In the hours leading up to the killings, the shooter reportedly showed off his guns to an LA-based woman via his Instagram page, taunting that he was ‘about to do’ something.
One video at the scene appears to show the suspected gunman, named by Governor Greg Abbott as Salvador Ramos, approach the school while what sounds like gunfire is going off in the background
A police vehicle is seen parked near of a truck believed to belong to the suspect behind a shooting at Robb Elementary School
When the woman asked what, he said: ‘I’ll tell you before 11.’ He began shooting at noon.
‘As soon as he made entry into the school he started shooting children, teachers, whoever was in his way, he was shooting everybody,’ Texas Department of Public Safety spokesperson Lt. Chris Olivarez said.
‘This is just evil’, an Uvalde resident told the New York Times, ‘I’m afraid I’m going to know a lot of these kids that were killed.’
Another local, Adolfo Hernandez, told the same paper that his nephew had been in a classroom near where the shooting took place.
‘He actually witnessed his little friend get shot in the face,’ Hernandez said. The friend, he said, ‘got shot in the nose and he just went down, and my nephew was devastated.’
Speaking anonymously, one classmate said Ramos had begun showing up to class less and less as other kids bullied him over his clothes and his family’s financial situation.
‘He would, like, not go to school…and he just, like, slowly dropped out. He barely came to school,’ the friend said.
After the North Dakota native graduated from high school, the friend said they became even more distant from each other, but would occasionally message each other on Xbox.
‘He would message me here and there,’ he said.
Four days prior to Tuesday’s shooting, Ramos reportedly sent his friend a picture of the AR and a backpack full of 5.56 rounds.
‘[He had] probably like seven [magazines],’ he said. ‘I was like: ‘Bro, why do you have this?’ and he was like: ‘Don’t worry about it.”
Law enforcement are seen near the crime scene on Tuesday afternoon after the mass murder at the school
New video from the chaotic scene shows police arriving to the scene with their guns in hand
A woman cries while speaking on the phone outside the Ssgt Willie de Leon Civic Center, where students had been transported from Robb Elementary School to be picked up following the shooting
Under a new Texas law passed in September, those aged 18-21 could buy guns if they had a protective order, because they were at risk of family violence, stalking, prostitution or sex trafficking.
The law also removed the requirement for a permit for a handgun. Rifles were already permitted in Texas without licenses.
In the days leading up to the massacre, Ramos told his friend that he ‘looked very different now.’
‘You wouldn’t recognize me,’ he messaged less than a week ago.
Ramos’s social media was full of photos of his new guns, which he bought on his 18th birthday, state senator Roland Gutierrez said.
Ramos also messaged a Los Angeles-based woman on May 12 on Instagram, tagging her in a photo of the guns.
‘You gonna repost my gun pics,’ @sal8dor_ direct messaged her.
‘What your guns gotta do with me,’ [sic] she replied on Friday.
‘Just wanted to tag you,’ he said back.
Then at 5:43am on Tuesday, @salv8dor_ messaged her and said: ‘I’m about to’.
The girl asked ‘about to what’ to which he answered: ‘I’ll tell you before 11.’
He said he would text her in an hour and urged her to respond.
‘I got a lil secret I wanna tell u,’ he messaged with a smiley face emoji covering its mouth.
‘Be grateful I tagged you,’ he wrote.
She replied: ‘No it’s just scary,’ adding: ‘I barely know you and you tag me in a picture with some guns?’
His last message at 9:16am on Tuesday was ‘Ima air out’.
The shooting started around 11:32am. The woman reacted with horror when she learnt what he had done.
‘He’s a stranger I know nothing about him he decided to tag me in his gun post,’ she wrote.
‘I’m so sorry for the victims and their families I really don’t know what to say.’
She then added: ‘The only reason I responded to him was because I was afraid of him I wish I stayed awake to at least try to convince him to not commit his crime. I didn’t know.’
When an Instagram user asked if she was his girlfriend, she replied: ‘I don’t know him and I don’t even live in Texas.’
He largely dropped out, and took the job at Wendy’s nearby, where co-workers remember him as quiet.
Adrian Mendes, evening manager at the Wendy’s, said Ramos ‘kept to himself mostly.’
‘He felt like the quiet type, the one who doesn’t say much. He didn’t really socialize with the other employees,’ Mendes told CNN.
‘He just worked, got paid, and came in to get his check.’
Mendes said that he did not know Ramos well – he was already employed when Ramos began in February – and didn’t see him most of the time because they were on different shifts.
Ramos worked from 11am to 4pm or 5pm, five days a week for about a year, according to the New York Times. He then quit about one month ago.
Ramos was shot and killed by law enforcement at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, after he had murdered 21 people.
— to www.dailymail.co.uk
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