The gunman who killed 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday allegedly sent a series of text messages to a 15-year-old girl in Germany moments before he carried out his deadly attack, CNN and German media reported.
The girl, who was not identified, had been in contact with 18-year-old Salvador Ramos for weeks.
In addition to video-chatting daily via FaceTime, the girl said she communicated with him via Yubo, a social live-streaming app. The two played online games via Plato, a gaming app.
In one text message exchange reviewed by CNN, Ramos complained to the girl, who lives in Frankfurt, about his grandmother being “on the phone with AT&T about my phone”, adding: “It’s annoying.”
A few minutes later, he wrote: “I just shot my grandma in her head.”
Then, at 11.21am CT he wrote: “Ima go shoot up a elementary school rn [right now].”
On Wednesday Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, told reporters the gunman posted to Facebook “approximately 30 minutes before reaching the school”.
Abbott said, “The first post was to the point of he said, ‘I’m going to shoot my grandmother.’ The second post was ‘I shot my grandmother’, the third post maybe less than 15 minutes before arriving at school was ‘I’m going to shoot an elementary school’.”
Abbott also said, “There was no known mental health history of the gunman.”
The shooting began to unfold at 11.32am when the shooter, who is also believed to have posted photographs of “my guns” on Instagram four days previously, opened fire in a classroom of nine- and 10-year-olds.
The German girl told CNN he had been talking to her regularly online since the beginning of May and had told her he planned to come and visit her in Europe.
“I’m coming over soon,” he told the girl at one point, attaching a screenshot of a Google flight itinerary from San Antonio to Germany.
The girl said he would send her selfie videos and that he seemed to spend a lot of time at home by himself.
Before the attack, Ramos told the teenage girl he had bought bullets, adding that they would expand once they entered a body. When she asked what he was going to do with them, he said she should “just wait for it”.
The girl told CNN that Ramos asked her about her life in Germany and told her he spent most of his time home alone.
“Every time I talked to him … he never had plans with his friends,” she said.
“He looked happy and comfortable talking to me.”
But the girl said other messages he sent alarmed her, including one in which he said he “threw dead cats at people’s houses”.