Salvador Raimondo Ramosthe young man identified as the author of the shooting at the elementary school of Uvaldebarricaded himself with his victims in a center assembly hall before executing them, according to the spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, Lt. Chris Olivarez.
Ramos barricaded himself around his victims and shot them, killing two teachers and 19 children, Olivarez said, for whom this way of acting shows “simply the total evil of the shooter,” reports CNN.
Olivarez has said that the agents in charge of arresting Ramos toured the school almost completely before they could find him, force the lock on the assembly hall and shoot him down. The 18-year-old was wearing a bulletproof vest “used by tactical teams, such as SWAT”, and was carrying an assault rifle.
For the moment, Olivarez has not dared to give a figure of how many more children could be injured. “It was a small assembly hall, there could have been between 25 and 30 students there (…) I don’t have the exact number (…). It was the typical one where there are large groups of children (…) all together, without nowhere to go,” he said.
“There are many unanswered questions,” said Olivarez, who has reported that Texas authorities are already working with the FBI to determine if the school was a specific target of Ramos. “We are looking if there was any indicator, any red flag, looking at social networks,” she explained.
“What we know about the shooter is that he resided here in Uvalde, attended one of the local high schools, lived with his grandparents, was unemployed, no friends, no girlfriend that we can identify at this point, no criminal record, no affiliation with gangs either,” he said.
Olivarez has said that Ramos’s first victim, his own grandmother whom he shot before breaking into the school, is alive and that they are trying to locate his grandfather and other close relatives.
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Meanwhile, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has proposed that teachers be trained to “defend” schools and their students in such situations through a program run by police.
“There should be a program in Texas that allows teachers, school districts, to be trained to help defend the school as well,” Paxton said in a telephone interview on Fox.
“We are sending 40,000 million to Ukraine, surely we can defend children in our schools and bring trained police to help do that,” he insisted.
For his part, Democratic Congressman from Connecticut Chris Murphy has taken the floor in the Senate to “literally beg” his Republican colleagues to once and for all take on the problem that exists in the United States with respect to weapons and has asked them to support laws “that make this less likely.
“This only happens in this country. Nowhere else do little kids go to school thinking they might get shot. Nowhere else do parents have to talk to their kids like I’ve had to about why they got locked up in a bathroom and were told to be quiet for five minutes in case a bad man comes into the building,” he said.
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Later, before the press, he rejected the argument of the Republicans to hold “mentally ill” responsible for this type of massacre and argued that what is happening in the United States cannot be explained in this light.
“Spare me that nonsense about mental illness. We don’t have more mental illness than any other country in the world. You can’t explain this through this lens because we’re not an outlier. We are in access to guns and the ability to of criminals and very sick people to get them. That’s what makes America different,” he explained.