Uvalde Mother Says She ‘Could Hear the Shots’ As She Picked Up Her Kids From School
Trigger warning: This article contains images of weapons used in mass shooting.
The parents of Robb Elementary School lived their worst nightmare on Tuesday as soon as they heard the news of the tragic shooting.
The 18-year-old gunman Salvador Ramos first shot his grandmother outside of their home, and then took her car to drive to the school. Armed with an AR-15 assault rifle, Ramos shot and killed 19 children and two adults, and injured 17 others.
Now, more details are emerging about the case: Ramos presented prior “aggressive” behaviors, per his Wendy’s fast-food chain co-worker, and was described by his own grandfather Rolando Reyes as “very quiet.”
The killer stopped going to school, and one friend remembers how he once cut up his own face with a knife.
The gunman also took to Facebook to send updates about how he was going to shoot his grandmother, and then another post reading: “I’m going to shoot an elementary school.” These messages were sent just minutes before the horrifying shooting.
While Ramos was finally killed by a Boarder Patrol agent, parents of students responded to the shooting as soon as they heard and rushed to the scene to get their kids to safety.
Univision interviewed one mother, Angélica Gómez, who managed to pick up her two children from Robb Elementary School as the shooting took place.
As Gómez describes, she could “hear the shots” fired when she arrived at the school to pick up her two children, Vladimir and Pablo. She said, “I couldn’t wait because I needed to pick up kids. If they killed me, they killed me, but I did go in and got my kids.”
The mother explains that they wanted to detain her, but she said, “You are not going to stop this mother.” She stated, “They wanted to stop me… take me to jail” but she “wasn’t scared.” Gómez also explained that when she grabbed her kids, she didn’t know if the gunman would see her and her children.
When the mother was finally able to leave the school with her two kids, she describes how they collapsed to the floor and they told her: “Mami, thank you for coming for us and picking us up. We love you… we were very scared.”
Meanwhile, Gómez explains how she has cried for her friends, the parents of the 19 children who were murdered by the shooter.
Several parents arrived on the scene after the shooting not knowing if their kids were dead or alive. Father Javier Cazares told The Washington Post: “There were five or six of [us] fathers, hearing the gunshots, and [police officers] were telling us to move back.”
Cazares then found out his daughter Jacklyn was a victim of the shooting. He continued, “We didn’t care about us. We wanted to storm the building. We were saying, ‘Let’s go,’ because that is how worried we were, and we wanted to get our babies out.”
