Uvalde school shooting

The Uvalde school shooting was a mass shooting on May 24, 2022, at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, United States, where 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, a former student at the school, fatally shot 19 students and 2 teachers, while injuring 18 others. Ramos was killed 77 minutes after entering the classroom by law enforcement officers.

It is the third deadliest shooting at an American school after the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007 and the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012 and the deadliest school shooting in Texas. After shooting and wounding his grandmother at their home, Ramos drove to Robb Elementary School, where he entered a classroom and shot his victims, having bypassed local and state officers who had been in the hallways. He remained in the classrooms for 1 hour and 14 minutes before members of the United States Border Patrol Tactical Unit breached the classroom and fatally shot him. Police officers did not breach the classroom, but cordoned off the school grounds, resulting in violent conflicts between police and civilians, including parents, who were attempting to enter the school to rescue children. As a consequence, law enforcement officials in Uvalde were criticized for their response, and their conduct was reviewed in separate investigations by the Texas Ranger Division and United States Department of Justice.

Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) officials laid much of the responsibility for the police response on Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Department (UCISD PD) Chief Pedro Arredondo, whom they identified as the incident commander. Arredondo disputed the characterization of his role as incident commander, but was fired by the Uvalde school board. A report by the Texas House of Representatives Investigative Committee attributed the fault more widely to "systemic failures and egregious poor decision making" by many authorities. It said, "At Robb Elementary, law enforcement responders failed to adhere to their active shooter training, and they failed to prioritize saving the lives of innocent victims over their own safety... there was an unacceptably long period of time before officers breached the classroom, neutralized the attacker, and began rescue efforts."

Shortly after the shooting, local and state officials gave inaccurate reports of the timeline of events and exaggerated police actions. The Texas Department of Public Safety acknowledged it was an error for law enforcement to delay an assault on Ramos' position in the student-filled classrooms, attributing this to the school district police chief's assessment of the situation as one with a "barricaded subject", instead of an "active shooter". Law enforcement was aware there were injured individuals in the school before they made their entrance. In June 2024, two officers, including Arredondo, were criminally indicted for allegedly mishandling the response to the shooting.

The shooting occurred 10 days after the 2022 Buffalo shooting. Discussions ensued about American gun culture and violence, gridlock in politics, and law enforcement's failure to intervene during the attack. A month after the shooting, Congress passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act and President Joe Biden signed it into law; it was the most significant federal gun reform legislation since the Federal Assault Weapons Ban of 1994.

Investigations revealed that Ramos was motivated to do the attack for fame. After the shooting, Robb Elementary was permanently closed. The district plans to demolish it and build a replacement.

On January 21, 2026, former Uvalde school officer Adiran Gonzalez was acquitted of 29 child endangerment charges. The trial of former Uvalde school police chief Pete Arredondo on 10 counts of "abandoning or endangering a child" has yet to be scheduled.

Background

Uvalde is a Hispanic-majority city of about 15,000 people in the South Texas region; it is located about 60 miles (97 km) east of the United States–Mexico border and about 85 miles (137 km) 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.

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, before taking her black 2008 Ford F-150. She survived and got help from neighbors while police officers were called in. She was then airlifted to a hospital in San Antonio in critical condition.

Ramos, using his Facebook account, sent three private messages to a 15-year-old girl from Germany whom he had met online prior to the shooting: the first to say that he was going to shoot his grandmother, the second to say that he had shot his grandmother, and the third — about 15 minutes before the shooting — to say that he was going to open fire at an elementary school. The girl replied, "cool". Later she faced trial in Frankfurt, Germany and was found guilty of "failing to report planned crimes." She was issued a warning and was required to "undergo educational measures." A spokesperson for Meta, the parent company of Facebook, said the posts were "private one-to-one text messages" discovered after the shooting took place.