“What is he going to use it for but for that purpose?” “I just don’t know how people can sell that type of a gun to a kid 18 years old,” Eliahna’s aunt, Siria Arizmendi, said angrily through tears. The dead included an outgoing 10-year-old, Eliahna Garcia, who loved to sing, dance and play basketball a fellow fourth-grader, Xavier Javier Lopez, who had been eagerly awaiting a summer of swimming and a teacher, Eva Mireles, with 17 years’ experience whose husband is an officer with the school district’s police department. emerged, grief engulfed Uvalde, population 16,000. over the past five years.Īs details of the latest mass killing to rock the U.S. Texas has some of the most gun-friendly laws in the nation and has been the site of some of the deadliest shootings in the U.S. This will continue to happen.” O’Rourke was escorted out as members of the crowd yelled at him, with one man calling him a “sick son of a bitch.” for tighter restrictions on firearms, the Republican governor repeatedly talked about mental health struggles among Texas young people and argued that tougher gun laws in Chicago, New York and California are ineffective.ĭemocrat Beto O’Rourke, who is running against Abbott for governor, interrupted Abbott’s news conference and called the tragedy “predictable.” Pointing his finger at Abbott, he said: “This is on you until you choose to do something different. He said Facebook is cooperating with investigators.Īmid calls around the U.S. Ramos sent private, one-to-one text messages on Facebook that were “discovered after the terrible tragedy,” company spokesman Andy Stone said. It was not clear whether Ramos specified which school. Ramos wrote in the first that he was going to shoot his grandmother, then that he had shot the woman, and finally that he was going to shoot up an elementary school, according to Abbott. The governor said Ramos, a resident of the small town about 85 miles west of San Antonio, had no known criminal or mental health history.īut about a half-hour before the bloodbath, Ramos sent three messages online, Abbott said. Investigators shed no light on the motive for the attack, which also left at least 17 people wounded. “But it is far more evil for someone to gun down little kids.” Anyone who shoots his grandmother in the face has to have evil in his heart,” Gov.