Uvalde school shooting

Uvalde is a Hispanic-majority city of about 15,000 people in the South Texas region; it is located about east of the United States–Mexico border and about west of San Antonio. In 2022, about 90% of Robb Elementary School's 600 students in the second through fourth grades were Hispanic, and about 81% of the student population came from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. On the day of the shooting, there had been an awards ceremony at the school. Ahead of the shooting, Ramos had purchased 1,657 total rounds of ammunition, which included 375 rounds of 5.56 NATO ammunition purchased on May18, 2022. A total of 315 rounds were found inside the school, consisting of 142 spent cartridges and 173 live rounds. Additionally, a total of 922 rounds were found on school property outside the building, consisting of 22 spent cartridges and 900 live rounds. Overall, Ramos fired 164 rounds during the shooting. Police and Border Patrol officers fired a combined total of 35 rounds during the shooting: eight in the hallway and 27 in the classroom where Ramos was killed. School security preparations The city of Uvalde spent 40% of its municipal budget on its police department in the 2019–2020 fiscal year, and UCISD, the school district operating Robb Elementary School, had multiple security measures in place at the time of the shooting. The Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Department (UCISD PD) had a six-officer police department responsible for security at the district's eight schools. It had also more than doubled its expenditures on security measures in the four years preceding the shooting, and in 2021, it expanded its police force from four officers to six officers. The state of Texas had given UCISD a $69,141 grant to improve security measures as part of a $100 million statewide allocation made after the 2018 Santa Fe High School shooting, in which ten people were killed. The district also had a security staff that patrolled door entrances and parking lots at secondary school campuses. Since 2020, Pedro "Pete" Arredondo had served as UCISD's police chief. The school and school district had extensive security measures in place. The school used Social Sentinel, a software service that monitored the social media accounts of students and other Uvalde-affiliated people to identify threats made against students or staff. The district's written security plan noted the use of the Raptor Visitor Management System in schools to scan visitor identity documents and check them against watch-lists, as well as the use of two-way radios, fence enclosures around campus, school threat-assessment teams, and a policy of locking the doors of classrooms. According to a report released by the Texas House of Representatives on July 17, although the official school policy was for exterior and interior doors to remain locked, staff members would often unlock or open doors due to a lack of keys. Additionally, some employees were desensitized to the intruder alert system, as it was almost always used for incidents of an undocumented migrant in the area running from police. UCISD held joint security training exercises in August 2020 along with the Uvalde Police Department, the Uvalde County Sheriff's Department, and other local law enforcement agencies. UCISD also hosted an active shooter scenario training exercise in March 2022, which covered a range of topics, such as solo responses to active shooters, first aid and evacuation, and scenarios enacted through role-playing. The exercise also covered the ability to compare and contrast an active shooter situation versus a barricaded subject or hostage crisis where an armed person isolates themselves with limited to no ability to harm others. The March 2022 training materials for UCISD said, "Time is the number-one enemy during active shooter response ... The best hope that innocent victims have is that officers immediately move into action to isolate, distract or neutralize the threat, even if that means one officer acting alone." The materials also put forth the position that a "first responder unwilling to place the lives of the innocent above their own safety should consider another career field". == Events ==

Shooting On May 24, 2022, Salvador Ramos and his 66-year-old grandmother had an argument over his failure to graduate from high school at their home in Uvalde, during which he shot her in the face, Most of the shooting occurred inside the building within the first few minutes; Ramos was inside the classroom for over an hour while armed police remained outside the classroom and building. Reyes additionally stated that Ramos, while inside the classroom, had stomped on his victims heads and arms, and had spat on them. According to Reyes, he heard law enforcement approach his classroom from what sounded like the hallway three times, but they did not enter; during one of these occasions, he heard a student from the adjoining classroom 112 saying, "Officer, we're in here. We're in here." As law enforcement had already left, Reyes said Ramos "walked over there, and he shot again." Officers were not successful in establishing negotiations. == Victims ==

Nineteen students and two teachers were killed in the shooting: ;Students • Nevaeh Alyssa Bravo, 10 • Jacklyn Jaylen Cazares, 9 • Makenna Lee Elrod, 10 • Jose Manuel Flores Jr., 10 • Eliahna Amyah Garcia, 9 • Uziyah Sergio Garcia, 10 • Amerie Jo Garza, 10 • Xavier James Lopez, 10 • Jayce Carmelo Luevanos, 10 • Tess Marie Mata, 10 • Maranda Gail Mathis, 11 • Alithia Haven Ramirez, 10 • Annabell Guadalupe Rodriguez, 10 • Maite Yuleana Rodriguez, 10 • Alexandria Aniyah Rubio, 10 • Layla Marie Salazar, 11 • Jailah Nicole Silguero, 10 • Eliahna Cruz Torres, 10 • Rojelio Fernandez Torres, 10 ;Teachers • Irma Linda Garcia, 48 • Eva Mireles, 44 The children were in the fourth grade. The teachers taught in the same fourth-grade classroom. Eighteen people were injured: fourteen children, one teacher, the perpetrator's grandmother, and two police officers. Abbott said the two officers were struck by bullets but had no serious injuries. Several victims died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, including Mireles. Uvalde Memorial Hospital's CEO reported that eleven children and three other people were admitted for emergency care following the shooting. Four were released, and two, described only as a male and a female, were dead upon arrival. Four other victims, the perpetrator's grandmother and three students, were taken to the University Hospital in San Antonio. == Perpetrator ==

Life Salvador Rolando Ramos Two months prior to the shooting, he posted a video of himself on Instagram aggressively arguing with his mother and referring to her as a "bitch". On May 14, Ramos sent a private Instagram message reading, "10 more days". A person responded, "Are you going to shoot up a school or something?" He replied, "No, stop asking dumb questions. You'll see." A year before the shooting, Ramos started posting pictures to his Instagram account of semi-automatic rifles that were on his wish list. According to the Texas Department of Public Safety, in September 2021, Ramos asked his older sister to buy him a gun, but she refused. On May 17, 2022, a day after his 18th birthday, he legally purchased a Smith & Wesson semi automatic rifle from a local gun store. He then purchased another rifle three days later. Investigators later found that his gun had a "hellfire" trigger device, which decreases the time required for the trigger to reset, increasing the possible rate of fire. Ramos sent an Instagram message to an acquaintance he met through Yubo, which showed the receipt for an AR-15 style rifle purchased from Georgia-based online retailer Daniel Defense eight days before the shooting. He posted a picture of two rifles on his Instagram account three days before the shooting. He used the money that he had been saving up from his job at Wendy's to purchase these items. Ahead of the shooting, Ramos had purchased 1,657 total rounds of ammunition, which included 375 rounds of 5.56 NATO ammunition purchased on May18, 2022. Motive The primary motive for the attack was identified by a 77-page Texas House of Representatives committee report as a wish to achieve "notoriety and fame". Ramos explicitly stated online days before the attack that he planned something to "put him all over the news" and expressed frustration over the low number of views on his social media accounts. == Investigations ==

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) are assisting local police in the investigation. Ramos' guns and magazines were recovered by law enforcement for analysis. Two days after the shooting, state officials said that the Texas Ranger Division was investigating local police's conduct during the incident. On May 29, the United States Department of Justice announced it would review the law enforcement response to the mass shooting at the request of Uvalde Mayor, Don McLaughlin. After initially praising first responders, Governor Greg Abbott called for an investigation into the lack of initiative displayed by law enforcement. On May 27, Abbott said, "Bottom line would be why did they not choose the strategy that would have been best to get in there and to eliminate the killer and to rescue the children?" On June 1, ABC News, citing multiple unnamed law enforcement sources, reported that the Uvalde Police Department (UPD) and the UCISD police force had stopped cooperating with investigations soon after the DPS said on May 27 that police had erred in delaying entry into the classroom. The DPS responded that the UPD and UCISD police force "have been cooperating with investigators", while specifying that UCISD police chief Pedro Arredondo "provided an initial interview but has not responded to a request for a follow-up interview with the Texas Rangers that was made two days ago." Also on June 1, Arredondo told CNN that he was "in contact with DPS every day" and said he would not release further information about the events of the shooting while funerals are ongoing, citing respect for families: "Whenever this is done and the families quit grieving, then we'll do that obviously." When Uvalde Police Department's acting chief Lieutenant Mariano Pargas was interviewed by authorities two days after the shooting, he did not mention that he had known at the time that there were children in the classroom with the shooter. Pargas said that he had officer Ruben Ruiz removed from the hallway after Ruiz said that Ruiz's wife was shot in her classroom, because "we were just afraid that he was gonna try to run in the classroom and try to do what I wanted to do if I could have done it". When Pargas was interviewed again in mid-June and asked about 911 calls made from inside the classroom, Pargas said he cannot remember, and does not mention that he had called his department's dispatchers, who told him about 911 calls from children inside the classroom. Instead, Pargas said: "The last thing we thought was that [the shooter] had actually shot the kids. We thought he had shot up in the air, broken the lights. We had no idea what was behind those doors." Texas House Investigative Committee On June 9, a committee of three started their investigations into the shooting on behalf of the Texas House of Representatives; the committee consisted of Representative Dustin Burrows (R-Lubbock), Representative Joe Moody (D-El Paso) and former Texas Supreme Court member Eva Guzman (R). That day, committee leader Burrows explained that the investigation would be done in private out of "respect for the process" and wanting to be "thorough" and "accurate" before revealing "any conclusions". On June 20, before the committee had a hearing at Uvalde City Hall, a fire marshal told parents, journalists, and a chaplain to leave the premises because "someone is intimidated". Attempts to block release of police records On June 16, the City of Uvalde through its attorneys cited several reasons to prevent the release of police records related to the shooting. The stated reasons include: information that "is not of legitimate concern to the public"; "highly embarrassing information" related to criminal history; potential revealing of police "methods, techniques, and strategies for preventing and predicting crime"; potentially distressing information; potentially exposing city employees or officers to "a substantial threat of physical harm"; privacy; and the "dead suspect loophole", where information is suppressed for crimes in which no one has been convicted, including in cases where the suspect is dead. Hallway video Freeman F. Martin, deputy director of Homeland Security Operations at the Texas DPS, informed Burrows that the district attorney of Uvalde County has objected to the release of a portion of a video taken in the hallway during the police response. The clip ended immediately before officers breached the classroom and did not show any images of children. Burrows, Martin, and Uvalde mayor Don McLaughlin believe that releasing the footage would be helpful to the public. On July 12, 2022, the Austin American-Statesman released 77 minutes of video composed of footage from hallway cameras and an officer's body worn camera. The released video was edited to obscure the identity of a student and to remove the sound of children screaming. The video was intended to be shown to the families of victims on Sunday, July 17, before it would be released publicly. The Austin American-Statesman obtained a copy of the video and published it on July 12, creating anger amongst some of the victims' families while others expressed support for its publication. The leaked video attracted further criticism and outrage, showing law enforcement to seemingly not understand the gravity of the situation, including one officer taking a pump of hand sanitizer from a dispenser, and two other officers exchanging a fist bump. == Aftermath ==

UCISD asked parents not to pick up their children until all Robb Elementary School students were accounted for. At around 2:00 p.m., parents were notified to pick them up. All district and campus activities were canceled, and the parents of students at other schools were asked to pick up their children due to school bus cancelations. Memorials and tributes Shortly after the shooting, a memorial was created outside the school for the victims and survivors with balloons, candles, and crosses. A local man made 21 crosses, inscribed with the victims' names to be placed outside the school. Pedro Arredondo Chief Pedro "Pete" Arredondo disputed being the incident commander for law enforcement responding to the shooting. On November 14, 2023, Arredondo would also lose his honorary discharge status. On June 27, 2024, Arredondo was indicted on charges of child endangerment by an Uvalde County grand jury. That day, Arredondo turned himself in Uvalde County Jail to be booked for 10 counts of child endangerment. Another former officer, Adrian Gonzales, was charged with 29 counts of child endangerment in a separate indictment on the same day. Potential copycat threats In the wake of the shooting, Donna Independent School District, which serves Donna, Texas, an area approximately from Uvalde, received a "credible threat of violence". In response, the district canceled school while it investigated the threat. One of Ramos's girlfriends was arrested in 2023 for making repeated threats to the Uvalde community. In late October 2022, Texas state trooper Sergeant Juan Maldonado was fired from the Texas Department of Public Safety; CNN reported that he was one of the first responding law enforcement officers, having arrived on the scene within five minutes of the start of the mass shooting. On November 14, 2022, CNN reported on audio and video of the actions of Uvalde Police Department's acting police chief, Lieutenant Mariano Pargas, during the shooting, stating that at 12:16 p.m. Pargas made a call and asked a dispatcher "how many are still alive" in Room 112, with the dispatcher telling him: "Eight to nine are still alive"; at 12:17 p.m. Pargas tells a Border Patrol officer that there are injured victims; at 12:18 p.m. Pargas does not mention children to a Texas Ranger discussing the flow of information. On November 17, 2022, Pargas retired from the Uvalde Police Department, two days before the Uvalde city council would discuss whether he should be fired. In January 2023, Christopher Ryan Kindell was fired from the Texas Rangers due to failing to treat the gunman as an active shooter; Kindell has appealed the firing. In August 2024, the Texas Department of Public Safety reinstated Kindell to his previous duty. In September 2023, the Texas Department of Public Safety stated that its internal investigation had concluded, and with no more officers to be punished. Criticism of police In January 2024, the Department of Justice released a report criticizing several failures of the Uvalde Police Department, including a failure to recognize the active shooter situation, a failure to take "courageous action", failure to secure the crime scene, failure to establish standard operating procedures and failure to communicate with families. One parent of a survivor of the shooting said that since the report had been released, his family and other families of victims and survivors had been harassed by Uvalde police, who would pull them over arbitrarily and were trying to make them leave town. == Law enforcement failures and controversies ==

Confronting the shooter Almost 400 law enforcement officers, including 150 U.S. Border Patrol agents and 91 Texas DPS officers, came to Uvalde during the shooting. Ruiz later resigned from his position in the police department. At a May 26 press conference, when asked whether first responders had erred in waiting for reinforcements, DPS official Victor Escalon said he did not "have enough information to answer that question yet". Inaccurate initial statements by Texas authorities Officials, including Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Texas DPS director Steve C. McCraw, gave inaccurate and incomplete initial accounts of the shooting. During the meeting, a one-page document titled "narrative" was given to McCraw, the state's top police official. This was presented to him by city attorney Paul Tarski. Uvalde city officials then pressured McCraw to publicly endorse their storyline and hold a press conference in which he was asked to change his depiction of events into a version more favorable to their liking: one in which "the quick arrival of officers at the school" would be promoted, highlighting "their success in containing the gunman." The "narrative" document was made available to The New York Times following a public information request. The city claimed, "There was zero hesitation on any of these officers' part, they moved directly toward the gunfire" and "The total number of persons saved by the heroes that are local law enforcement and the other assisting agencies is over 500." The document defended the delayed police response prior to final confrontation with the gunman, stating that time was "not wasted but each minute was used to save lives of children and teachers" and that "Absent the shields, every U.P.D. officer was of the opinion that breaching the door was suicide." However, according to The New York Times, "Some of the footage from the scene raises questions about the city's account. Video from the hallway of Robb Elementary ... made clear that shields began arriving in the hallway outside the classrooms long before the officers moved in." The city's description of events also conflicted with McCraw's previous statements to the public, in which he portrayed a scene where officers had not adhered to standard training procedures. The hour-long meeting was "heated", and voices were raised. McCraw refused to endorse the city's narrative as presented to him, saying that he disagreed with their summary. District attorney Busbee also objected to the city's narrative and argued her point with the Uvalde city attorney, saying she was "concerned with the release of inaccurate or incomplete information." == Responses ==

Ramos's parents Ramos's mother said that she had no explanation for her son's attack on the school but that he "had his reasons for doing what he did and please don't judge him. I only want the innocent children who died to forgive me." His father apologized for his son's actions and said, "He should've just killed me, you know, instead of doing something like that." Angeli Gomez, who was handcuffed by police when she ran into the school to rescue her children, was later interviewed by CBS News. She said that she was on probation from charges from a decade prior, and that law enforcement contacted her after the shooting to warn her not to publicize her story because she could face charges for obstruction of justice. Reactions from politicians President Joe Biden ordered flags at federal buildings to be flown at half-staff. the tweet was taken down within two hours. were further spread by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and other far-right House Republicans and conservative media figures and social media users, After the incident, McConaughey visited the White House to push for stricter gun laws and mental health reform. Resulting gun control discussions Political President Biden delivered a speech on the shooting and asked, "When in God's name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?". Entertainment In a press conference during the 2022 NBA playoffs, Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr expressed his outrage at the refusal of American politicians to implement laws on gun control, This was the 21st time The Onion republished this article to its homepage, coincidentally the same number as the number of victims of the Uvalde shooting. In the wake of the school shooting, CBS pulled the FBI season four finale, an episode titled "Prodigal Son" (which centered on an investigation into a school shooting plot), from the evening's planned airing, and replaced it with a rerun of an earlier Season 4 episode ("Under Pressure," which originally aired February 1) in its place. The episode would later air on October 4, as part of the show's fifth season. Legal proceedings Grand jury proceedings over law enforcement In late 2023, Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell convened a grand jury to evaluate whether or not enforcement could be held criminally responsible for their response on the day of the shooting. One day after the release of the U.S. Department of Justice's report in January 2024, the grand jury began hearing testimony. Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) Director Col. Steve McCraw testified before the grand jury in February. Multiple law enforcement officers, including officers from DPS, were also subpoenaed to testify. The jury also toured Robb Elementary School for about an hour in June. On June 27, 2024, the grand jury indicted first Uvalde school district police chief Pedro Arredondo and another former officer, Adrian Gonzales, on charges of child endangerment, a state felony. Arredono was charged with 10 counts of child endangerment, Gonzales with 29 counts. The same day, Arrendano was arrested and booked into the Uvalde jail, and was then released after posting a $10,000 surety bond and nine $10,000 personal recognizance bonds. , Arredondo's trial still remains unscheduled, with his pretrial hearings also being paused after the prosecution was accused of withholding information following a key witness' decision to change their testimony. On January 21, 2026, Gonzales was acquitted of all 29 charges. Lawsuits towards gun manufacturers and others A Uvalde staff member filed a petition for information about Daniel Defense on June 2, attempting to make a prima facie case against the gunmaker for its marketing of the weapons. The staff member had been outside delivering food to the school for an end-of-year party when she witnessed a car crash. She then had gone inside to grab her cellphone to call 9-1-1 about the crash and had propped open a door to the school with a rock but had kicked the door shut when she ran inside after witnessing the shooter hopping a fence and coming towards the school. This was one part of the misrepresented details that were published after the shooting. Families from the nineteen victims from the shootings filed three separate lawsuits in May 2024. One suit was seeking $500 million in damages from Texas state police officiers for their botched response to the shooting. The second suit was against Daniel Defense for the manufacturing of the gun used in the shooting. The third suit, filed in California, was against Meta Platforms and Activision Blizzard, claiming that Meta's Instagram and Activision's Call of Duty games had indoctrined the shooter towards gun violence. Legislative action Canada Starting on May 26, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party of Canada took steps in proposing new firearms regulations, Protecting Our Kids Act On June 2, the United States House Committee on the Judiciary proposed the Protecting Our Kids Act. 15 Senate Republicans voted to support it. It was the most significant federal gun reform legislation in almost 30 years, since the Brady Bill of 1993 and the since-expired Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994. The following day, Senate received the bill and passed it on March 21, leading to its signing by Governor Abbot on June 14, 2023. On September 1, 2023 the bill that focused on allocating funds toward school safety budgets/upgrades including the implementation of armed officers was made effective. On May 19, 2025, the act was passed unanimously by the Senate after its proposal from the Uvalde Senate representative, leading to its intended signing by Governor Abbott. United States Legislative Action Table == Legacy ==

Multiple memorials were held in Uvalde and across Texas in commemoration for the victims for the one year anniversary of the shooting on May 24, 2023. Survivors, family members and supporters gathered for events such as a 77-minute vigil (the amount of time waited outside the classroom by authorities), candlelight vigils, butterfly release, and mariachi performances. President Biden spoke about the anniversary at the White House with 21 candles at the base of the White House Grand Staircase, and spoke about his frustration at a lack of change in gun policy. Similar frustration was echoed by survivors and family members who waited for investigations and legal cases to finish and policy to change, and many of these topics have caused anger and strife to be seen throughout Uvalde. ==Cultural depictions==

In 2024, journalist Craig Garnett, publisher of the Uvalde Leader-News, released ''Uvalde's Darkest Hour'' through Texas A&M University Press. The book offers a detailed journalistic account of the events before, during, and after the shooting, as well as the local response and recovery efforts. Another nonfiction volume, The School Shooting in Uvalde: Preventions, Interventions and Solutions (2024), edited by Terry C. Robinson, explores policy failures and psychological, educational, and sociopolitical aspects of school shootings. == See also ==