The father of the Texas school shooter has apologised for his son’s massacre that claimed 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 to go on a killing spree, describing him as ‘a good person’ who ‘stuck to himself.’
He admitted having a distant and difficult relationship with Salvador Jr – 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.’
Ramos Sr spoke to the Daily Beast two days after his son burst into Robb Elementary School in the city of Uvalde, southern Texas, armed with a legally-purchased AR-15 style rifle and opened fire on a fourth-grade class and their teachers.
Before the attack on Tuesday, May, 24, Ramos Jr had shot his 66-year-old grandmother Celia Gonzalez in the face during an argument.
He spent more than an hour inside the school along with the terrified students and their dead classmates, before a Border Patrol arrived and shot him dead.
Ramos Sr said his son was a quiet boy who was not naturally inclined to violence, but who grew angrier as he got older.
‘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 also blamed the distance between himself and his son because his own mother is suffering from cancer, and he has been isolating himself with her due to Covid.
Ramos Sr said Ramos Jr grew frustrated with the restrictions a month ago and stopped talking to him.
Ramos Jr had only turned 18 on May 16, before he went to buy two AR-15s and more than three hundred rounds of gun ammunition at the Oasis Outback store in Uvalde, a 10-minute drive from his house.
His grandmother, believed to be 66-year-old Celia Martinez, took him for dinner at Applebee’s to celebrate his birthday not knowing had plans to embark on a shooting spree.
