Austin, TexasAccording to documents made public Monday, the young shooter at the 2022 Robb Elementary School tragedy was a gifted student when he first started attending the school in Uvalde, Texas, but years of growing behavioral and academic issues preceded him shooting at a fourth-grade classroom.
The downward slide of 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, which authorities have thoroughly recorded since the attack that murdered 19 children and two instructors, is more fully shown in the school files. According to one assessment, Ramos was a motivated learner and thinker in kindergarten, but by middle school, he had received numerous written-ups or suspensions for bullying, harassment, and not meeting the state’s minimal testing requirements.
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Ramos dropped out of high school in October 2021, seven months before to the shooting, due to his lack of attendance, low academic performance, and failing grades in almost every class, according to the records.
Following a protracted legal struggle to conceal information related to one of the bloodiest classroom attacks in U.S. history, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District released thousands of pages of records, including these records.
The attack and the gunman, whose problematic past has been outlined in earlier state and federal investigations, are the subject of few new findings in many of the records. Furthermore, the records don’t reveal anything about the police’s sluggish and much criticized response because they don’t contain any video from the day of the incident.
Among the records are emails sent to and from school administrators in the days and weeks following the attack, as well as the personnel file of former Uvalde schools police chief Pete Arredondo, one of two officers charged with a crime for the tardy reaction.
A school district secretary texted Arredondo at 11:40 a.m. on the day of the shooting to inform him that another staff member had heard gunfire outside the school.
After reading the text to Arredondo, they proceeded to lock themselves down.
The only responding police charged with a crime for their acts that day are Arredondo and Adrian Gonzales, another former officer of the Uvalde school system. Both of them are set to go on trial later this year after entering not guilty pleas to many charges of child abandonment and endangerment.
In 2022, media outlets, such as The Associated Press, filed a lawsuit against the county and district to obtain their data pertaining to the mass shooting that claimed the lives of two instructors and 19 pupils. In July, the Texas Appeals Court affirmed a lower court’s decision requiring the information to be made public.
The documents are not the first time the public has seen one of the deadliest mass shootings in the country and the sluggish, widely denounced reaction by law enforcement. Police body cam footage and 911 call recordings were made public by Uvalde city officials last year.
Records of the shooter
According to his academic records, Salvador Ramos was a kindergartener who was recognized as a fantastic little boy who worked extremely hard. However, he later resigned from high school due to poor academic performance and received repeated suspensions in junior high.
According to the documents, the adolescent continued to have behavioral and academic issues throughout middle school, skipping classes and getting into arguments with teachers. He was deemed to be at risk by the ninth grade.
The documents support earlier conclusions made public by investigators, such as a Texas House report from 2022 that described how the shooter chose a dark path after quitting school and grew more solitary in the year before the shooting.
Chief of Police at Uvalde School
The law enforcement response, which saw almost 400 local, state, and federal officials wait more than 70 minutes before engaging the gunman in a classroom full of dead and injured students and instructors as parents outside pleaded with them to enter, has mostly been attributed to Arredondo.
The Arredondo emails following the shooting reveal that a district administrator wrote a note 12 days after the incident asking, “How are you today?” and that the chief is still being questioned about security at district events and about someone who liked Ramos’ social media remarks.
In a letter dated June 22, the Uvalde district placed Arredondo on paid leave, instructing him not to attend any school-related events, enter any district buildings, or walk on any campus. Arredondo was also instructed in the letter to comply with any investigation and refrain from discussing it with district staff.
Post-shooting communications and distress
In the days following the shooting, a group of Uvalde school employees exchanged text messages. While officials acknowledged criticism of the response, they refrained from replying. A law enforcement schedule with a 77-minute delay was mentioned in one session. Another cited a news report in which a representative of the Texas Department of Public Safety was questioned about the tardy reaction.
Kenneth Mueller, the district’s director of student services, said that “we may be witnessing a huge battle within the DPS.” The superintendent, Hal Harrell, replies via text message to give him a call to arrange this.
A fourth-grade teacher who was inside the school when the shooting occurred informed Harrell via email on June 12 that the district was ignoring the remaining staff members.
“I attended a press conference to learn about the future of the school I love,” Lynn Deming wrote. She told me that after pupils heard gunfire during recess, they were brought inside, and that bullets then entered through my windows.
Deming claimed that in an attempt to shield her kids from the shooting, she attempted to lie in front of them.
She wrote, “I tried to stay calm for my students even though I had blood all over my back and shrapnel in my back from when he shot in my window.” In case it was the last thing my students ever heard, I needed them to know they were loved.
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Contributions came from Jesse Bedayn in Denver; Juan Lozano in Houston; John Hanna in Topeka, Kansas; Claudia Lauer in Philadelphia; and Lisa Baumann in Bellingham, Washington.
