Uvalde High School students consoled the friends and family members of Alexandria Rubio, 10, who died in a mass shooting. Photo / Ivan Pierre Aguirre, The New York Times
The shooting that left 21 people dead at an elementary school was the second such plot in four years. Residents are left grappling with the question of what could have been done to stop it.
Even as they scheduled graduation parties and made plans to move for college or start new jobs, seniors at Uvalde High School sometimes found themselves thinking back to 2018, when two of their eighth-grade classmates had been charged with plotting a mass shooting.
The two boys planned an attack on the anniversary of the 1999 Columbine High School shooting, the police said, researching how to make explosive devices and creating a list of students they wanted to kill. They had originally planned their attack for 2022, in the spring of their senior year, but the plot was foiled and the two boys, 13 and 14, were arrested.
Then, four years later, the unimaginable happened: Another student from the same class charged into an elementary school with an AR-15-style rifle, killing 19 children and two teachers in one of the deadliest school shootings in US history.
How a town of barely 15,000 people could have had two mass shooting plots in four years — both emerging out of the Uvalde High School class of 2022 — is a question many here are struggling to understand as the overwhelming grief of 21 funerals starts to give way to a search for what could have gone so wrong.
"It does create a sense of insecurity, a concern for safety," said Alejandra Castro, who leads a division of the Family Service Association that provides mental health support for families in Uvalde. She said one student, in 2018, had shared a worry that seemed to burden many students as they went on to high school: "What if somebody else carries out what somebody else started?"
Ariana Diaz, a high school senior, said she was now planning to speak to a counsellor about the nagging fear she had carried with her since eighth grade, and how to think about what had happened in the town she grew up in.
Several students at the school said they never heard what happened to the two boys arrested after the plot in eighth grade; the boys disappeared from school, they said, and because they were not tried as adults, the outcome of the charges against them was never publicly disclosed.
"We were so young, just in eighth grade, to be receiving a threat like that," Diaz said.
Many families in Uvalde have been uncertain where to turn in a town that some say is ill-equipped to respond to serious mental health problems even in normal times, let alone after a mass tragedy.
"I told people, sometimes there aren't any words," said Melissa Cabralez, one of several counsellors in town stepping in to help people who have been traumatised by the shooting. "We're doing the best we can, but this is 21 families and extended families and a whole school campus of children who are scared."
Immediately following the shooting, Governor Greg Abbott of Texas downplayed the issue of gun control and emphasised the need to intervene before people become violent. "We as state, we as a society, need to do a better job with mental health," he said.
Police officials said the gunman, Salvador Ramos, 18, who was killed by a law enforcement tactical team, had never been diagnosed with a mental illness, nor had he been arrested in connection with any crime.
Yet it has become clear that he had left plenty of warnings.
There was the video of him in the passenger seat of a car, holding a bag that appeared to contain a bloodied animal. There was the fight with another student in a high school bathroom, captured on camera, and the volatile arguments with his mother that a friend overheard when they played online video games together. There was the name he used within Fortnite: "Sal k1ll em all."
There were also the violent thoughts he shared with girls around the world whom he met online. Sometimes the comments were addressed directly to the girls — he told one in Germany that he would "smack you in your face" if he was with her — and sometimes they made reference to an ex-girlfriend who, he said in one Instagram message, was "terrified of me."
"I like hurting others," he wrote last summer to a girl in San Jose, California, who is now 16 and asked that her name not be used. Seeing a photograph of his ex-girlfriend, he told her, had left him "feeling violent." Two months later, he wrote to the same girl that he would rather see his ex-girlfriend "in a hospital with a broken neck" than to see her happy without him.
The fact that Ramos was able to legally buy two AR-15-style rifles shortly after his 18th birthday, along with hundreds of rounds of ammunition, has raised questions among some of those familiar with Ramos and his internet posts.
When he posted a photograph of two black rifles to his Instagram story days before the shooting, one high school freshman sent the picture to an older cousin and said, "Who let him?" before confiding that he was "scared now to go to school."
Accounts of how the gunman was treated in school have varied. Several friends of the gunman have said that he was bullied for years — first over a lisp and later about his clothes or with crude comments about his family members. But classmates who were not as close to Ramos said that he quickly became the bully, degrading people and trying to pick fights.
Parents have been critical of the delayed police response to the shooting, but they have also been asking increasingly pointed questions of school officials and people close to the gunman. Did no one pay attention when Ramos began behaving strangely and dropped out of school? Why did fellow students not report their disturbing interactions with him? Is it mere coincidence that Uvalde was home to two mass shooting plots in four years, or does that signal a unique problem?
Cynthia Herrera and Jose Manuel Flores Sr., whose 10-year-old son, Jose Flores Jr., was killed in his classroom, said they do not understand how the gunman's relatives and friends had seemingly ignored the warning signs, particularly as Ramos posted pictures of his firearms on social media in the days before the attack.
"There is no excuses or 'Oh, I didn't think nothing of it,'" Herrera said. "Anything like that, they better report it."
"There's a lot of wrong everywhere," Flores said. "This could had been avoided."
Cabralez, who works primarily with children, said families in Uvalde were battling anxiety and depression even before the shooting, as Covid-19 sickened residents, disrupted school and caused a chain reaction of financial woes.
The region in recent years has discussed building a large, state-funded mental health clinic, mostly to alleviate the need for sheriff's deputies to drive people suffering from mental health crises all the way to Kerrville, about 160km away. But current and former local officials said plans for the clinic did not mean the community was facing a critical mental health threat.
"Was there a massive call for it before this happened? No. Was there a massive mental health crisis in Uvalde before this happened? I would say no," said Rogelio M. Muñoz, a lawyer who served on the Uvalde City Council until last month.
Muñoz said that the discussion of mental health in the community was important, but that it was largely separate from the gunman's attack on the school.
"The one undeniable fact is that if he hadn't been able to buy the gun, this wouldn't have happened," he said.
On the day before the shooting, a Monday, Jaime Cruz was among the high school seniors who took part in a Uvalde tradition, visiting elementary and middle school students in their schools and high-fiving them in their caps and gowns.
"A thing that you look forward to is walking through the schools yourself, in your cap and gown, and seeing your previous teachers there and the young students who are so eager to finally be in your place," Cruz said.
Little did he know that one of his longtime classmates would be walking the same hallways a day later with a gun. On the day of the shooting, Cruz said, he was eating a meal with several classmates at one of their homes when a video emerged of Ramos running into the elementary school.
Cruz recognised the door the gunman used as the same one he himself had walked through to greet the children a day earlier. He immediately felt nauseated.
"Even if we didn't know who he was, it would still be hard to process that 19 kids died and two teachers passed away," Cruz said. "The fact that it was someone that we knew and someone that lived in the same town as us and went to the same school as us, it's more shocking."
Seniors had long planned to gather at the end of the school year to watch the sunset from the high school principal's ranch, a symbolic conclusion to what had been, until then, a joyful year.
Instead, as news of the shooting emerged, seniors sent one another frantic texts, horrified by what had happened at Robb Elementary School, which many of them had attended.
They managed to hold their sunset gathering on the weekend after the shooting, a delayed event that became less of a celebration and more of a chance to grieve. "It benefited all of us," Cruz said. "Just to see each other."
Instead of the principal's ranch, they met in a private place, with security.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Karen Zraick and Eduardo Medina
Photographs by: Ivan Pierre Aguirre
© 2022 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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