The Texas elementary school shooter Salvador Ramos shared three chilling posts on Facebook revealing his plan minutes before he shot dead 21 people at Robb Elementary School on Tuesday. The chilling revelations were made by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday saying that Ramos even posted that he was going to shoot his grandmother.
The warnings went unnoticed and Ramos went on with his carnage killing 19 students and two teachers before being shot dead by the cops. However, Facebook parent Meta said that the warnings were not in the form of posts but were "direct messages", for which it did not reach the broader audience.
Chilling Revelations
Abbott said that there was "no meaningful forewarning" of a shooting on Tuesday at the elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, except for a series of messages on the Ramos' Facebook page around 30 minutes before the attack.
Abbot said that 30 minutes before the attack, the gunman posted: "I'm going to shoot my grandmother." Within minutes he made a follow-up post in which he wrote, "I shot my grandmother," Abbott said.
Less than 15 minutes later, he made another post that read: "I'm going to shoot an elementary school," the Texas governor said during Wednesday's press conference. Ramos, although, said that he would attack an elementary school, didn't give the name of the school.
However, all the warnings went unnoticed as they were direct messages and not posts, which reach a large audience. According to Meta Communications Director Andy Stone, the messages were private one-to-one text messages and were uncovered after the incident.
Hours before the attack, he also sent Instagram messages to a stranger. He had sent a cryptic message, "I'm about to", to a stranger on Instagram. He was using an account with the username "salv8dor_", which was taken down shortly after that he was identified as the shooter.
Narrow Miss
Had the messages been traced earlier, the carnage could have been avoided but it was almost impossible as they were private. Authorities have found no criminal history or history of mental illness for Ramos "yet," Abbott said, but are still determining if he had a juvenile record.
Hours before the shooting, Ramos also posted photos of his weapons and a mirror selfie of himself. The account also posted a snapshot of two weapons and tagged another user in the post.
The user of the tagged account, @epnupues, claimed that she had never heard of Ramos. He messaged her that he "got a lil secret" and tagged her in the gun photo. He was asked why he tagged her in the photo with the weapons, and she expressed her fear.
He then disclosed his plans that left the user shocked but even before she could do anything, Ramos had left for the elementary school.
Ramos entered the school through a backdoor into an unoccupied classroom. The gunman then entered another classroom through a sliding door that connected the unoccupied room to the mayhem.
All of the fatalities were in the same fourth-grade classroom, according to Lt. Christopher Olivarez of the Texas Department of Public Safety, who spoke to NBC's Today on Wednesday. Olivarez said the Ramos barricaded himself inside the classroom, "shooting anyone that was in his way."
Authorities were going around the campus, breaking windows and trying to evacuate children and workers as Ramos shot at responding police officers. They were then able to force their way into the shooter's classroom.
He was finally shot dead by a Border Patrol agent who rushed inside the school with a tactical team. Ramos was behind a barricade, returning fire, but the border patrol agent managed to shoot and kill the gunman before he could claim more victims.
"They came in from opposite sides. The BORTAC agent ended up exchanging gunfire with the shooter, killed the shooter, and I am told that the agent was injured in his leg," reported Fox News.
