The teenage gunman in the 2022 mass murder at Robb elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, began his formal education as a bright learner before years of escalating academic and behavioral troubles preceded him opening fire on a fourth-grade classroom, according to records released on Monday.
The school files reveal in greater detail 18-year-old Salvador Ramos’ downward spiral that authorities have well documented since the attack that killed 19 children and two teachers. One assessment shows Ramos was described as a “motivated thinker and learner” in kindergarten, but by middle school, he was suspended or written up multiple times for harassment, bullying and failing to meet the minimum statewide testing standards.
In October 2021 – seven months before the shooting – Ramos withdrew from high school because of “poor academic performance, lack of attendance” and records showed he had failing grades in nearly all classes.
The records are among thousands of pages released by the Uvalde consolidated independent school district after a yearslong legal battle to withhold documents connected to one of the deadliest classroom attacks in US history.
Many of the documents offer scant new revelations surrounding the attack and the gunman, whose troubled history has been laid out in previous state and federal investigations. Nor do the records – which do not include any video from the day of the shooting – shed light on the hesitant and widely criticized police response.
The documents include the personnel file of former Uvalde schools police chief Pete Arredondo, one of two officers facing criminal charges over the slow law enforcement response, and emails to and from school administrators in the days and weeks after the attack.
At 11.40am on the day of the shooting, Arredondo received a text from a school district secretary noting that another employee reported hearing gunfire outside the school.
“They went ahead and locked themselves down,” the text to Arredondo read.
Arredondo and Adrian Gonzales, another former Uvalde school district officer, are the only responding officers who face criminal charges for their actions that day. They both have pleaded not guilty to multiple counts of child endangerment and abandonment and await trial.
Media organizations, including the Associated Press, sued the district and county in 2022 for the release of their records related to the mass shooting that killed 19 students and two teachers. A Texas appeals court in July upheld a lower court’s ruling that the records must be released.
The records are not the public’s first glimpse inside one of the nation’s deadliest mass shootings and the slow law enforcement response that has been widely condemned. Last year, city officials in Uvalde released police body-cam videos and recordings of 911 calls.
Ramos’ academic records showed a student who as a kindergartener was described as “a remarkable little boy” who was a “very hard worker”, but he went on to be suspended multiple times in junior high, was classified as “at risk” by ninth grade, and withdrew from high school because of “poor academic performance”.
Text messages between a group of Uvalde school staffers show in the days after the shooting, officials briefly noted criticisms of the response but avoided responding via text message. One exchange noted a law enforcement timeline that included a 77-minute delay. Another referenced a news article where a Texas public safety department spokesperson was pressed on the delayed response.
On 12 June, a fourth-grade teacher who was inside the school during the shooting told superintendent Hal Harrell in an email that surviving staff members were being ignored by the district.
That teacher, Lynn Deming, described taking students inside from recess when they heard gunshots and then bullets “came through my windows”.
Deming said she tried to lay in front of her students so that she could block them from Ramos’s gunfire.
“I had shrapnel in my back from when he had shot in my window, I had blood all over the back of me, but I tried to stay calm for my students,” she wrote. “I needed my students to hear that they were loved in case it was the last thing they ever heard.”
