Texas School Shooter’s Dad Said His Son ‘Should Have Just Killed Him’

This week, the father of the 18-year-old shooter who opened fire at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, killing 21 people wants the world to know how sorry he is for his son’s actions.

Thursday, in an interview with The Daily Beast, Salvador Ramos shared his thoughts with the world: “I just want the people to know I’m sorry man, [for] what my son did. I never expected my son to do something like that.” Ramos, 42, said. “He should’ve just killed me, you know, instead of doing something like that to someone.”

On Tuesday, his son, also named Salvador, opened fire inside a fourth-grade classroom at Robb Elementary School after shooting his grandma in the face and stealing her vehicle. After crashing the truck into a ditch outside the school, he then began shooting inside a classroom. The 18 year old, whose assault resulted in the deaths of at least 19 younger children and two adults, was executed at the site of the crime, but not before authorities took nearly an hour to stop him.

It was the bloodiest shooting at a school that has occurred in the United States in nearly ten years. According to Ramos, he was at work on the day of the incident, and he didn’t find out about it until his mother contacted him to inform him about it. He began making frantic phone calls to the local prison, demanding to know whether his son was being held there.

In due time, the understanding dawned upon him. “They killed my baby man,” he says. He adds: “I’m never gonna see my son again, just like they’re not gonna see their kids. And that hurts me.”

Ramos stated that his son was “a good person” who “stuck to himself,” despite the horrendous killing that his son committed on Tuesday. He said that he had no clue what caused his kid to turn into such a vicious person or why he selected the school as his target.

However, he did mention that he has seen some transformation in his kid over the last several months, and that was the acquisition of a set of boxing gloves, which he then began using in a nearby park. “I said, ‘Mijo, one day somebody’s going to kick your ass,’” Ramos says. “I started seeing different changes in him like that.”

Reportedly, the younger Ramos did not get along well with his mother and had quit high school before to his graduation this year due to their strained relationship. His father stated that he had not spent much time with him recently due to the pandemic as well as his employment outside of Uvalde.

According to Ramos, his own mother was battling cancer, and because of this, he could not take the chance of getting exposed to the coronavirus. He went on to say that his kid stopped talking to him around a month ago after becoming upset with the safeguards taken against COVID. “My mom tells me he probably would have shot me too, because he would always say I didn’t love him,” he told The Daily Beast.

In addition, Adriana Reyes, the boy’s mother, was criticized by Ramos for her failure to provide her son with more clothing and school materials. He said that his son was the victim of bullying at school due to the fact that he always wore the same pair of high-water pants, and that this was eventually the cause of his dropping out of school.

It was verified by the younger Ramos’s former classmates and their relatives that he had been the target of bullying in middle school due to a speech impediment.

On the other hand, several of Ramos’s former coworkers and other people who knew him stated that he had an aggressive tendency, and his online history pointed to someone who was all too willing to fall into perverse bragging about firearms and mass murder.

A high school friend of Ramos’s told the Washington Post that she had seen him get into many fist fights, and a former coworker of his told The Daily Beast that he had a tendency to harass his female coworkers.

“I don’t think he was necessarily bullied,” the classmate, Nadia Reyes, told the post. “He would take things too far, say something that shouldn’t be said, and then he would go into defense mode about it.”