The Deadly Inexplicable Again

"How many scores of little children who witnessed what happened - see their friends die, as if they're in a battlefield, for God's sake.They'll live with it the rest of their lives."

"I hoped when I became president I would not have to do this, again. [Their parents] will never see their child again, never have them jump in bed and cuddle with them."

"As a nation, we have to ask, 'When in God's name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby'?"

"We have to act. [Reinstate the assault weapons ban and other] common sense gun laws."

U.S. President Joe Biden

 

"He was engaged by an Uvalde ISD police officer who works here at the school. And then after that, he was engaged by two other officers from the Uvalde Police Department."

"[While] engaged [with the school officer, the gunman dropped a black bag full of ammunition outside of the school. Inside that bag was actually more ammunition. He actually dropped that ammunition and ran inside the school where he barricaded himself inside one of the classrooms and, unfortunately, that is where he started conducting his business of shooting innocent children, shooting the two innocent adults that were inside that classroom."

 Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) Sgt. Erick Estrada 

Photo Mass shooting at Texas elementary school; neighbours come together to comfort one another CNN

 

A local pastor, Marcela Cabralez, after a call from a colleague who operates a nearby funeral home pleading for her help with the children who were sheltering inside the funeral home, found the young students traumatized when she arrived. Some of those children were rocking themselves, holding one another, covering their ears, screaming. Some started blankly ahead of themselves. They told the pastor, one after another what they had witnessed: bullets flying through windows, glass breaking, their classmates bleeding.

Highly impressionable children. Who can sense when danger or a threat to their inborn sense of security arises, seek escape from the immediate source of the danger. What they cannot escape, however is what it was they saw and what they knew to be happening. That memory is firmly lodged deep in their memory bank, filed away for the rest of their lives, to surface on occasion and haunt them. A lived terror in the subterranean recesses of their minds, fearfully troubling, behind everything else in their future that they experience.

The secret inner rage of a high school boy just turned 18, who had gone on a shopping spree to buy for himself several high-powered rifles. To add to the  high-powered truck that was also in his possession. Texting with a teen-age girl in Germany who he had 'met' on line only a few weeks earlier, he described his anger and boredom,  hinting at the solution to his rage about to unfold. First he killed his grandmother because he was infuriated with her interfering in his affais.

 

And then he drove his truck to an all-Hispanic elementary school, where he barged in, had an exchange with a security guard, then barricaded a grade four classroom where he shot 19 children, all around age ten, to death. Two adults were to follow. Uvalde, Texas, has had an experience they would not wish on any other town in the United States, or elsewhere in the world. Just as the school year was about to conclude for the summer break, hell sent the Angel of Death to take charge in the guise of a psychopathic teen on a psychotic rampage.

Apart from the 21 who had been killed outright, others, some seriously wounded, were hospitalized. The young gunman appeared to deliberately drive his car into a ditch. Then he walked over to the school holding a rifle. He evaded police, to enter the school building where he walked from classroom to classroom, firing at children, spreading terror and the promise of death. 

18-year-old Salvador Ramos who lived in Uvalde had no criminal record. Initial evidence appears to indicate that the weapons were bought in the wake of his 18th birthday. The school video shared on social media showed someone dressed in black, running to a side door of the school, carrying a rifle. The owner of an auto repair shop and a co-worker had left the business, looking for lunch                      when they heard gunshots from the school.Then they saw women working at a nearby funeral home screaming,"He's shooting! He's shooting!"

The two men approached the armed teen intending to ask whether they could be of assistance, after seeing his vehicle in a ditch close to the school. The teen responded by shooting at them, before barricading himself in the school for the 45 minutes it would take to shoot at his little victims and kill them.

Law enforcement agents secure the scene of the shooting on Tuesday.