The Uvalde, Texas mass shooter told a German girl he was chatting with online that he shot his grandmother in the face and planned to attack an elementary school just moments before the massacre.
Salvador Ramos, 18, sent the texts on Tuesday just before he barricaded himself in a classroom at Robb Elementary School where he killed 19 students and two faculty members. The shooter was eventually killed by Border Patrol agents, but not before responding police ignored the cries of desperate parents asking them to enter the school.
In the text exchange the shooter mentions his grandmother, saying he was "waiting for this b****." He also said he had to wait until his grandfather left before he could act.
According to the shooter, the incident between himself and his grandmother began over an issue with his phone. It's not clear what that issue was from the texts, though other reporting suggests the pair were also fighting about Ramos failing to graudate high school that year.
What is known is that at some point in the argument Ramos did shoot his grandmother before fleeing the house. The shooter’s grandmother then called the police and was later found in critical condition.
Later in the text he tells the recipient that "Ima go shoot up a elementary school rn."
The recipient of the texts was a 15-year-old German girl he had met on an app. The pair had reportedly chatted on FaceTime and shared photos, but the girl never met the shooter.
The pair had been chatting for weeks prior to the shooting. A day before the shooting, the gunman told the girl that he had bought ammunition that expands when it enters a body, causing massive damage. She asked him what he was going to use it for, to which he replied “just wait for it.”
The girl spoke with CNN ananomously and said most of her conversations with the shooter seemed normal, though there were a few red flags leading up to the day of the attack, including his apparent isolation.
“Every time I talked to him, he never had plans with his friends,” she told the network.
She also said she became concerned when the shooter told her that he “threw dead cats at people’s houses.”
