The armed young man was introverted, loved video games and had diction problems
If what Salvador Romero was looking for in his race to hell was to get attention, he got it. Half the country looked closely at his photo this Wednesday, looking for any clue that would enable them to understand the senseless massacre he committed Tuesday at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, but they found the same as those who knew him. : An introverted teenager and anti-social, speech impediment, often ridiculed and always a refugee in video games. Last week he turned 18, which allowed him to legally acquire the two rifles, seven high-capacity magazines and 375 cartridges he was soon using.
Most of the 19 children he killed on Tuesday were in the same fourth-grade class, a classroom where he had barricaded himself for 45 minutes. His child victims ranged from eight to ten years old, including ten-year-old Xavier Lopez, one of the first to be identified. He liked playing football and eating hamburgers. His mother had been to his school for graduation that morning, not suspecting that it would be the last time she would see him. His cousin, Annabel Guadalupe Rodriguez, also shot dead, was in the same class. His family had suffered several losses due to covid, “and now that things are starting to happen, this is coming,” his bewildered father sighed. Teacher Eva Mireles died hugging her students as they tried to protect them. “You’re a hero, Mom, but this doesn’t seem real,” her daughter exclaimed that evening in a letter she made public. “I just want to hear your voice when you wake me up in the morning, you tease while you take a nap, and argue about crazy things and then laugh about it together. I want it all. I want you back.”
The young man who had stolen her forever had started with his own 66-year-old grandmother, who took him in when he quarreled with his mother, which apparently happened often. Her friends heard her yelling at him from behind as they competed with him in video games. She taught him because he didn’t go to school, spent his life in front of the console, because he wasn’t doing anything useful. Maybe that’s why he had been spotted in a Wendy’s burger joint, where the owner said he wasn’t like the others. «My people talk, laugh, joke, you understand? He didn’t, he was always on his own.”
Lately, he spent almost all of his time with his grandmother, his friends said, with whom, judging the result, the relationship must not have been very good either. At 11:30 a.m. Tuesday, neighbors heard shots and looked out into the street and saw him slip out of gear into a pickup truck that was firing. The woman was dying, but she survived until five o’clock in the afternoon, longer than him.
It was clear to him where he was going, as if he had thought about it: an elementary school close to the institute he was enrolled in, for which he was less and less seen. It was the last day of the school year, but no one thought it would also be the last of their lives. Alfred Garza learned over lunch from his wife that he hadn’t been able to pick up the girl from school. There had been a shooting and the doors were sealed, he told her. He ran there and sat on the sidewalk all day, waiting to pick up Amerie Joe, a “lively” 10-year-old girl who “talked to everyone” and “always joked,” he told the New York Times. York Times’ and NPR.
“Initially they said that shots had been fired, but no one was injured. Then there were some injured.” And little by little, the atmosphere grew darker and more tense, with dark omens. But when her family was ushered into a room of the town hall to learn that her little girl was one of the victims, she couldn’t. to believe.
Romero had arrived and was killing left and right. He drove the truck into a ditch and when workers from a nearby funeral home came to help him, he fired back. Then he got out and quietly walked into the school. By the time he entered the classroom where he was to barricade himself, the police were already on his tail and had cordoned off the building.
It was lunchtime, some children were eating in the cafeteria when the bullets shattered the windows. The employees turned off the lights, closed the door and ordered stealth. Screams echoed through the halls. Some had tried to jump out of windows, others had tried to hide in closets. The grandchildren of Reverend Marcela Cabralez, 9 years old, hid in the toilets and came out alive.
It is not yet known what happened in the cursed classroom, as no one got out alive. Police shot the teen, whom he described as “devils”, to ensure the carnage did not rise to the next level. Outside, terrified children came out bleeding, some passed out and others had seizures. Refugees at the Hillcress Memorial Funeral Home, which was offering free services this Wednesday, Rev. Cabralez tried to comfort them. For those who had no comfort, it was for those who saw their children leave nowhere. They put their photos on social networks, they looked them up in the hospital, nobody said anything to them, they had to be somewhere. And in the end, after asking for pictures and all kinds of clues, at the town hall, they were told what no one wanted to hear.
They didn’t even hand in their bodies. Robb High School is a large crime scene in a small rural town of 16,000 inhabitants, where almost 80% are of Hispanic descent and everyone knows each other. Nice and folksy people, say the Texans, hard workers who sought a better life for their children and got up today without them. Why? So that? That’s what the whole country is wondering, once faced with the task of understanding these deaths and ending the gun carnage. “In the name of God, when will we be able to face the gun lobbies?” President Joe Biden lamented in frustration. That is the question. It’s the moment of truth again.
Source: La Verdad
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