Mass murderer Salvador Ramos boasted of buying a gun and said some people “deserved to be raped” on the teen app Yubo, where users nicknamed him “school shooter”– even before Tuesday’s massacre in Uvalde, Texas.
It was unclear how long before Ramos slaughtered 21 people, including 19 kids inside Robb Elementary School that he was given the chilling nickname, Sky News reported.
“He was given the nickname ‘Yubo’s school shooter,’ ” one unidentified 17-year-old girl who uses the platform told the outlet.
“People would join … be like, ‘Oh, hey, look it’s Yubo’s school shooter,’” said the 17-year-old, adding, “He never tried to shut down that nickname, he seemed almost proud of it, you know.”
Ramos also bragged about buying a gun and in one audio chatroom said people deserved “to get raped,” according to the report.
Yubo is a French social networking app that has tens of millions of users.
The 17-year-old girl, who met Ramos on the app, also told Sky News Ramos would “threaten rape and kidnapping and murder” in chatrooms. When he privately messaged her and other girls, she said he would threaten them if they didn’t reply.
Ramos texted her on Valentine’s Day that he would worship her, but later told her to “go jump off a bridge” when she didn’t get back to him, according to Sky News.
He wasn’t any better in real life, two of Ramos’ classmates told the San Antonio Express News.
Keanna Baxter spurned a come-on from the “eerie” Ramos after she witnessed a friend who dated him grow frightened of their volatile fellow Uvalde High School student.
“He dated my ex-friend. And then they broke up,” Baxter, 17, told the paper. “And then he tried to date me after that, but I told him no. Because he always had this kind of eerie sense about him.”
Ramos was unpredictable and violent when he was dating her friend, Baxter said.
The latest from the Texas school shooting
“She told me that he was scary,” Baxter said. “Like he would get super violent. And when he would lose his temper, she would literally be scared for her life, basically.
“He would send her these really nasty messages, where he’d go from super sweet to screaming at her back to super sweet.”
“He was overall just aggressive, like violent,” Baxter added. “He would try and fight women. He would try and fight anyone who told him no — if he didn’t get his way, he’d go crazy. He was especially violent towards women.”
One of those women was Crystal Foutz, 17, also a Uvalde High School student. Ramos threatened to harm her in comments on Instagram, after he got into a fight on social media with her ex-boyfriend.
“It was just harassing. And I never like provoked him or anything like that,” Foutz said Friday. “He was aggressive for no reason. … I just blocked him.”
Foutz also heard about Ramos harassing his former girlfriend after they broke up.
“Another friend of mine, when she worked with (Ramos), there was an incident between a girlfriend and a boyfriend — (Ramos) tried to fight the girlfriend,” Foutz told the Express News. “And it really was over nothing. Just because he was aggressive like that.”
It’s not the first time his contemporaries described volatile behavior from Ramos.
Santos Valdez Jr., 18, said they were close until the future gunman went off the rails. Ramos showed up one day at a park where they played basketball with cuts all over his face. At first told Valdez he was scratched by his cat, then revealed the truth – he had cut himself “just for fun.”
There’s a video circulating of Ramos holding up a dead cat in the passenger seat of a car, said Baxter. Foutz said she saw TikTok videos Ramos posted of himself punching walls while wearing boxing gloves and declaring he could fight anyone.
“He was just very like pushy,” Foutz recalled. “If you would ask for something or if he was trying to pick on you or he was trying to tell you something and you didn’t give him a reaction, it would make him angry … (He was) very pushy, very aggressive.”
Rumors circulating among the high school students say Ramos was angry that he wouldn’t be able to graduate. Reports have said he dropped out of high school, but Baxter saw him in the school last month. Foutz remembered seeing him on campus last fall.
“To be honest, I didn’t think twice about this kid,” Baxter said. “I barely knew this kid for like a year. He kind of popped out of nowhere.”
Both girls called Ramos a “loner” with “no friends.”
“The people that did try and give him a chance to be friends with, he scared them away,” said Foutz. “He was a bully, really. If you didn’t give him what he wanted, he was a bully to you.”
“He didn’t have any friends,” Baxter said. “To be honest, no one ever spoke to him. Just because people were genuinely afraid of him.”
In fact, some students thought that if there was a target for this type of tragedy, it would be the high school.
“We all thought maybe they’re going to do it to the high school — because we’ve gotten threats before,” she said. “But not to the kids. It should have been us. There was no reason to go and hurt those kids.
“None of us are like that. None of us have that kind of hate in our heart to do something like that or know how this ever could have happened.”
