Everyone would love to know what was going through his mind, but Adriana Martínez Reyes asks that “please don’t judge him”
No one can imagine what motives Salvador Ramos might have for buying a pair of assault rifles and shooting an 8- to 10-year-old boy he found in an elementary school. Except his mother, Adriana Martínez Reyes.
Intercepted by Televisa cameras at the exit of a church where she was seeking solace, the woman apologized to the families of the children killed by her son. “Forgive me, forgive my son, I know he has his reasons,” he said in a trembling voice and red eyes. Americans look deep into the soul of their society, blaming lax gun laws, poor police performance, poor mental health and, finally, the broken-down house they lived in.
Everyone would want to know what was on his mind, but his mother didn’t give much clues either. “I don’t know what he was thinking, he had his reasons for doing what he did and please don’t judge him or me.” She, who has also been missing a son since Tuesday, is thinking more than anyone about asking her neighbors to “get closer to their kids instead of paying attention to the other bad things,” she asked introspectively. “I don’t know, I have no words for it,” he apologized, always in Spanish.
In the latter they watch him. Since Tuesday, María Rivera has been constantly hugging her eight-year-old son, in case one of those hugs turns out to be the last. He didn’t know Adriana, but he did know her mother, Celia, who lives a few blocks away and was the young man’s first victim. That morning, the young man had argued with his grandmother about paying his cell phone bill, as he had two months earlier with his mother because she had lost the Internet connection. Video games were his whole world.
The boy’s mother never thought there was violence behind the twisted look and introverted nature that made her boyfriend, Juan Álvarez, uncomfortable, who described Salvador’s relationship with his mother as “tumultuous” for NBC, though she denies. “It was weird, I never got along with him and I didn’t hang out with him. If you tried to talk to him, he would just sit there and leave.”
His father hadn’t seen him in over a month either. “I never expected my son to do something like this,” Salvador Ramos, who shares the same name as his son, told The Daily Beast. “He should have killed me, you know, instead of doing something like that to someone.” What is clear is that Adriana Martínez was not very lucky with the men who went through her life. Her ex-husband has a domestic violence record and, according to various sources, was not part of the boy’s life, whom he describes as a good person. In recent months, he said he had seen changes in him. He bought some boxing gloves and practiced in the park. He stopped going to class. He had a rebellious attitude. “I said to him: Mijo, one day someone will kick your ass.”
Maybe they already had. In class they made fun of him for his way of dressing and called him homophobic names because he painted his eyes. Her father blames his ex-wife for not buying her clothes, but Adriana worked as a waitress at a Mexican restaurant in town and didn’t seem to have many resources. The chain-and-zipper pants the boy always wore made him a target for others.
Since his fight with his mother, he had slept on a mattress on the floor with his grandparents, where Rolando Reyes had tried unsuccessfully to persuade him to go to class, he told Newsy. He never thought he had guns at home, he could have found a mess for him because as an ex-con he couldn’t have them under his roof. His class would graduate on Friday, without him. The ceremony has been postponed indefinitely, no one has anything to celebrate anymore.
Source: La Verdad
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