The father of the Texas school shooter has said he is ‘sorry’ for the massacre in which his son killed 21 people including 19 young children, saying the boy ‘should have just killed me’ instead.
Salvador Ramos Sr, 42, said he ‘never expected’ his youngest child – who was also called Salvador – to go on a killing spree, describing him as ‘a good person’ who ‘stuck to himself.’
But he admitted having a distant and difficult relationship with Salvador Jr – who was shot dead by police – and that his own mother believes the 18-year-old would have shot him if he could because ‘he would always say I didn’t love him.’
‘I don’t want them calling him a monster… they don’t know nothing, man,’ he said. ‘They don’t know anything he was going through.’
Before attacking the school, Ramos Jr had shot his 66-year-old grandmother Celia Gonzalez – from his mother’s side of the family – in the face during an argument.
He spent more than an hour holed up inside the school along with the terrified youngsters and their dead classmates, before a Border Patrol unit stormed in and shot him dead.
Ramos Sr painted a picture of his son as a quiet boy who was not naturally inclined to violence, but who grew angrier as he got older.
He backed an account given by one of Ramos Jr’s co-workers that he recently bought a pair of boxing gloves and would carry them around a nearby park, asking people to fight him while filming it.
‘I said, “Mijo, one day somebody’s going to kick your ass,”‘ the father recalled. ‘I started seeing different changes in him like that.’
Ramos, who lives outside of Uvalde where he works digging holes around utility poles for inspection, admits he hadn’t seen his son much in recent years.
He blamed the distance on the fact that his own mother is suffering from cancer, meaning he has been isolating himself with her due to Covid. He said Ramos Jr grew frustrated with the restrictions a month ago, and stopped talking to him.
But that picture is undercut by the fact that Ramos Sr also has a daughter, from whom he is also estranged. She no longer lives at home, having left to join the Navy.
And he has convictions, including one for violent assault of a family member.
Ramos Jr is also known to have had a strained relationship with his mother, Adriana Reyes, who has been described as a drug addict.
Friends told how he sometimes posted videos of himself having blow-up fights with her on social media, and that he had recently moved out to live with the grandmother he ended up shooting.
Speaking exclusively to MailOnline earlier this week, Adriana gave a similar account of her son as Ramos Sr.
She described him as a boy who ‘kept to himself and didn’t have many friends’, but insisted he ‘wasn’t a violent person’.
Adriana denied rumours that her relationship with her son was poor, saying she had bought him a card and a present – a stuffed Snoopy toy – for his birthday.
But the family insisted they had no idea he had also bought himself two high-powered assault rifles as a gift to himself at the same time, and also did not know he was posting pictures of them online along with threatening messages.
Those who were friends with Ramos say his descent into violence began longer ago than his family knew, including one friend who said he stopped hanging out with Ramos in their early teens when he began cutting himself.
Around the same time he began dressing in dark clothes and military boots and used his BB gun to target random people, one local claimed.
This is an excerpt from Daily Mail.
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