Witnesses are describing the horrific scene in a small town in Texas where 18-year-old Salvador Ramos allegedly killed 18 children and three adults at an elementary school in the town of Uvalde before being shot.
“We saw a little girl full of blood and the parents were screaming, it was an ugly scene,” Derek Sotelo, 26, who runs a nearby auto repair shop, told The Washington Post. “It’s a nice town, quiet, a tightknit community of 25,000, and everybody came out to help. It hurt our community, what happened. They were just little kids; they didn’t mean no harm.”
Ms Sotelo and a coworker were heading out to lunch when they say they saw Ramos erratically park a gray Ford F150 truck near the school. Bystanders, thinking he was having auto trouble, rushed to help him, before he started shooting at them.
“People thought that he was in trouble and so they jumped out to help him and he came out of his vehicle and started shooting at them,” another bystander told Telemundo.
Workers from a funeral home near Robb Elementary School began screaming that he was shooting, Mr Sotelo continued. The gunman then barricaded himself in a classroom, according to bystanders.
Tamic Martinez told the Post her 10-year-old son, a fourth grader, escaped the school by crawling out of a window. The boy saw two people get shot.
A woman named Janine A Turner wrote on Twitter on Tuesday that she was a resident of Uvalde, and that her nephew sustained non-fatal injuries in the shooting.
“At the beginning of the school year, my little [sic] wanted to stop going to her private school here in Uvalde. And switch to Robb elementary. For some reason, I didn’t want to do it. Today… I’m so glad I followed my gut instinct,” she wrote.
Another woman, Elsa G Ruiz, who identifies as a resident of Uvalde on Facebook, posted on the social network that her daughters sent her a video of the shooter, a clip which has not been officially verified by officials.
Armando Ramos, Salvador Ramos’s uncle, told The Wall Street Journal, he believes his nephew did not target the school intentionally, but rather ended up there during a police chase.
