(UVALDE, Texas) — The four children of Irma and Joe Garcia turned to their faith and community as they attended mass at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Uvalde, Texas, Thursday night.
Cristian, Jose, Lyliana and Alysandra Garcia were embraced by Rev. Eduardo Morales and parishioners.
Irma was one of two teachers killed in the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde on Tuesday. The family’s patriarch, Joe Garcia, suffered a fatal heart attack earlier Thursday, just two days after his wife was shot to death, his family confirmed.
“They were good church-going people, always willing to help, always seeing what they could do to be there for the community, not only their children, and I hope that we remember how giving they were, how loving they were,” Morales told Dallas ABC affiliate WFAA-TV of the Garcias.
The couple were supposed to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary later this year.
Irma Garcia was a fourth grade teacher at Robb Elementary School and had been teaching for the last 23 years. She and her husband had been married for 24 years, according to a biography page on the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District website.
She died Tuesday, after a gunman entered the school and opened fire, killing Garcia, co-teacher Eva Mireles and at least 19 children, in one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history.
As the Uvalde community continues to reel from the aftermath of the mass shooting, faith leaders have sprung into action, reaching out to support the local community. A Lutheran organization has also sent trained comfort dogs to Uvalde, a city about 84 miles west of San Antonio, after being invited to respond following Tuesday’s tragedy.
(NEW YORK) — Sandy Austin was in her second year working as a school counselor in Colorado in 1999 when two students opened fire at Columbine High School in Littleton, killing 12 of their fellow students and a teacher before turning their guns on themselves.
Responding to a district-wide call for counselors, Austin drove to a nearby elementary school where parents and caregivers were gathered to hear whether their children were alive. She spent the next nearly 10 months counseling students, teachers, school staff, parents and community members in the wake of the shooting.
On Tuesday, when a gunman burst into Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and killed at least 19 children as well as two adults, Austin said she immediately thought of the mental health support that the survivors, parents, teachers and community will need in the days, weeks and years ahead.
“It takes me right back to that day at Columbine,” Austin, who later worked as a crisis facilitator for the American School Counselor Association (ASCA), told ABC News’ Good Morning America in a recent interview. “I think of those little ones, all their life, they’re going to need that counseling. It’ll always be hanging over those kids.”
Among those killed were a pair of fourth-grade teachers who were longtime staff members at Robb Elementary School. The 19 slain children were students aged 10 and 11, including several who were cousins.
Tuesday’s massacre was the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history. While public attention in the aftermath of such a tragedy may turn to the school’s security plan or the local law enforcement response, mental health experts like Austin say the attention for them turns to the mental health plan that every school should have in place. This includes ensuring teachers and staff know how to talk to students about the trauma they just suffered in a developmentally appropriate way and having extra counselors ready to help, Austin said.
Austin noted at the time of the Columbine shooting, there was no real plan in place for how to help the school community cope.
In the two decades since, as the number of school shootings has risen dramatically in the United States, more schools now have plans in place. But, sadly, it’s become overwhelming for schools to try to keep pace with the growing scale of crises, according to Dr. David Schonfeld, a developmental behavioral pediatrician and director of the National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.
“I’m finding that the response is getting better, but the challenge is getting harder,” Schonfeld told GMA, explaining that shootings today “generally overwhelm any plan that’s in place with the resources that any school or district has.”
Schonfeld was one of the first mental health professionals on site in the wake of the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in which 20 children and six adults were gunned down. Less than six years later, Schonfeld helped a grieving community in Parkland, Florida, where a gunman shot and killed 17 students and staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018.
In the immediate aftermath of both the Sandy Hook and Stoneman Douglas shootings, grief counselors were made available to the school community, as they have also been in Uvalde after Tuesday’s shooting, according to local ABC affiliate KSAT-TV.
The work of the grief counselors, according to Schonfeld, is to listen to kids and adults alike, to validate their feelings, make them feel as safe as possible and support the community as it moves from a state of shock to realizing the permanency of the event.
“When I arrive in communities, one of the first questions I get is: ‘When we will go back to normal?’ And I say: ‘You will never go back to what you were. We don’t go back in time. We don’t forget life-changing events,'” Schonfeld told GMA. “It will change the community. That doesn’t mean they’re permanently damaged, it just means they’re altered.”
“The kids who are in the community are forever changed,” he added. “They will never go back to a childhood that didn’t have a mass shooting. That will define them.”
Austin said her grief counseling role in the immediate aftermath of the Columbine shooting was to bring water to parents to help them with the task of taking care of themselves.
“Everyone is just in a daze,” she said. “People don’t know what to think. They’re so shocked.”
As time goes on, a community like Uvalde will likely focus on bringing in mental health professionals who can offer support for the long-term, according to Schonfeld.
“Usually there is an outpouring of volunteers that want to assist and provide support, but that also has its own issues because you end up with a turnover of these volunteers so children may be talking about their distress and then going back and having to talk with someone else,” he said. “When we come, we try to provide systems-level solutions.”
In Parkland, grant funding allowed Broward County school officials to hire over 100 mental health professionals after the 2018 shooting, according to Rachel Kusher, a counseling specialist at Stoneman Douglas who was hired through the grant.
The newly-hired counselors were sent not just to Stoneman Douglas, where the shooting took place, but also to the five elementary schools and two middle schools that feed into the high school.
“At the high school, we had three full grade levels here that had been on campus the day of shooting. We had students who were injured in the shooting, we had siblings,” Kusher told GMA. “And then at the middle and elementary schools, a lot of students were on what we call ‘code red’ during the event, so a lot of those students also had been traumatized or had siblings that were here on campus at [Stoneman Douglas] the day of it, or neighbors, family members.”
“The difference between the shooting that occurs at a school versus a shooting that might occur elsewhere is that kids don’t really have a choice whether or not to come back — and the same thing for teachers,” she added. “They have to return to the site of the trauma.”
Recovery for survivors of school shootings is often even harder than for those impacted by other traumas, according to a research analysis published by the American Psychological Association (APA). Research shows students may experience survivors’ guilt and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and they may also struggle with grades and school attendance.
Kusher said that after the Stoneman Douglas shooting, counselors used a tiered-approach to reach students based on their need. At the most basic level, counselors went into classrooms at all eight schools to talk about resiliency and coping strategies.
For students who were on campus the day of the shooting, counselors helped on a more one-on-one basis with reactions like anxiety, PTSD, avoidance of school and making accommodation plans for students who wanted to, for example, sit in a certain seat in a classroom based on their experience that day, according to Kusher.
Students who were directly impacted by the shooting — whether through injury or the death of a loved one, friend or teacher — received even more direct attention.
“A lot of what I did personally as their school-assigned counselor was just really helped them with anything they needed, sit with them, sit with their family,” Kusher recalled. “They all have my personal cell phone number. They know how to reach me, and I still am in contact with a lot of them.”
Mental health counselors also provided long-term support for parents of students as well as for teachers and staff members across the school district. They also had to implement new ways to do things like fire drills and shooter response drills so that students would not be re-traumatized, according to Kusher and her colleague Tonia Summers, a middle school-level guidance counselor.
“What we found is, like a year later, people were now having different types of issues with PTSD. So for some it was right away, for some it was a few months and for some it was a year,” Summers told GMA. “There were all different levels of trauma that were happening and you have to be on top of all of it.”
Over the past four years, part of the job of counselors across the Broward County School District has also been responding to a “huge uptick” in 504 plans — support plans schools develop for students with disabilities — due to a sharp rise in anxiety diagnoses, according to Christine Ross, a guidance counselor who works with the elementary schools that feed into Stoneman Douglas.
And when another school shooting happens, like the one on Tuesday, counselors nationwide brace for new mental health traumas.
“It’s almost like ripping a Band-Aid off. It takes you right back to being there,” Ross told GMA. “You never know what the students are going to be like when they walk through the doors.”
Summers agreed, adding: “When you have dealt with some type of trauma, you’re more susceptible to other types of trauma, so something like this happens and they’re retraumatized again.”
The long-term and far-reaching effects that a school shooting can have on survivors were seen tragically three years ago, when a Stoneman Douglas student, a former student and the father of a Sandy Hook victim each died by suicide within the span of a few weeks in 2019.
Even in schools across the country where shootings are not part of their past, counselors responded to support students in the wake of Tuesday’s massacre, showing the even wider ripple effects a mass trauma can have.
“If there’s a big traumatic national event, like a school shooting, school counselors know to make themselves available and that’s what is happening,” Olivia Carter, a school counselor support specialist for Cape Girardeau Public Schools in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, told GMA.
“It really digs into a deep fear for a lot of people,” she added. “There’s a lot of fear and a lot of dysregulation, and there’s a need to have resources available.”
For Kusher and other counselors who have lived through a school shooting or its aftermath, they said they want those in Uvalde to know that they are there for them and are supporting them.
“Those school counselors at Robb Elementary School need to help themselves too,” Kusher said. “They’re part of this club that nobody wants to be a part of.”
(UVALDE, Texas) — There was blood in the hallway and children were covered in it, one of the students who survived the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, told ABC News.
“[The shooter] came in and said, ‘You’re all gonna die,’ and just started shooting,” Samuel Salinas, 10, recalled in an interview airing Friday on “Good Morning America.”
Salinas was a student in Irma Garcia’s fourth-grade class. They were scheduled to graduate Thursday, but the ceremony was canceled because Garcia, another teacher and 19 third- and fourth-grade students were killed in Tuesday’s massacre. Another 17 people were wounded, including three law enforcement officers.
The gunman, Salvador Ramos, allegedly purchased two assault rifles just days after turning 18 and used them to carry out the second-worst school shooting in U.S. history, killing 21 people, according to authorities.
Some of the children and teachers who walked into school that day had no idea it would be their last.
‘It was a normal day until…’
Salinas, whose mother died in a car accident in 2019, said his aunt dropped him off for school on Tuesday morning.
“It was a normal day until my teacher said we’re on severe lockdown,” he told ABC News, “and then there was shooting in the windows.”
Salinas said the gunman came into his classroom, closed the door and told them, “You’re all going to die,” before opening fire.
“He shot the teacher and then he shot the kids,” Salinas said, recalling the cries and yells of students around him.
“I think he was aiming at me,” Salinas said, but a chair was between him and the shooter, and the bullet hit the chair. Shrapnel struck Salinas’ thigh and got lodged in his leg. Then he pretended to be dead, he said.
“I played dead so he wouldn’t shoot me,” he added, noting that a lot of other children did the same.
A cellphone in one of the student’s desks started ringing, and as the girl was trying to silence it, Salinas heard gunshots. Police engaged the gunman and then moved desks out of the way to free the children, he said.
As police rushed him out of the room, Salinas said he saw the bodies of his teacher and other students.
“There was blood on the ground,” he recalled. “And there were kids […] full of blood.”
Nightmares and fear
Now, Salinas said, he has nightmares of the shooter and of being shot.
When asked how it felt to join the growing list of school shooting victims, Salinas said the idea of going to fifth grade is simply overwhelming.
“Whenever there’s a lockdown, then I’ll be really scared,” he told ABC News, fighting back tears.
Even the idea of reuniting with his friends who survived the shooting was too much for the 10-year-old to think about.
“I’m not looking forward to it,” he said. “I’m just going to stay home and rest.”
His father, Chris Salinas, sat quietly beside him as he recounted the experience. It was the first time he had heard the details of his son’s encounter and it nearly brought him to tears.
The one message the fourth-grader said he has for his fellow surviving classmates at Robb Elementary School: “I’m glad you’re alive.”
ABC News’ Lisa Sivertsen in Los Angeles and Izzy Alvarez in Uvalde contributed to this report.
(HOUSTON) — The National Rifle Association is forging ahead with its annual meeting in Texas days after 19 young children and two teachers were killed in a mass shooting in the state. A roster of leading Republicans, including Donald Trump, will appear — with protesters set to gather outside.
The weekend-long event starts Friday in Houston, some 270 miles away from the killings Tuesday at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. Multiple demonstrations, organized by interfaith leaders, Moms Demand Action, Indivisible Houston and other gun control advocates, are planned at the George R. Brown Convention Center, where much of the programming will be held.
Scheduled performers including Lee Greenwood said they would not be at the convention in light of the mass shooting. “After thoughtful consideration, we have decided to cancel the appearance out of respect for those mourning the loss of those innocent children and teachers in Uvalde,” Greenwood said in a statement.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner acknowledged the controversy on Wednesday but said, “It’s a contractual arrangement. We simply cannot cancel a conference or convention because we do not agree with the subject matter.”
The NRA plans to “reflect on” the Uvalde massacre and said this week that its “deepest sympathies are with the families and victims involved in this horrific and evil crime.”
“Although an investigation is underway and facts are still emerging, we recognize this was the act of a lone, deranged criminal,” the group said in a statement. “As we gather in Houston, we will reflect on these events, pray for the victims, recognize our patriotic members, and pledge to redouble our commitment to making our schools secure.”
Former President Trump is headlining NRA’s leadership forum on Friday. His oldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, were slated to speak Thursday night at the related NRA Hunters’ Leadership Forum Dinner and Awards Ceremony at the Rice Hotel, also in Houston.
Notably, no firearms will be allowed inside the assembly hall of the convention center on Friday due to President Trump’s appearance. The NRA said the ban is enforced by the Secret Service.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem — all Republicans — were also previously confirmed to speak at Friday’s forum. Abbott declined to say earlier this week whether he would still attend, telling reporters on Wednesday he was “living moment-to-moment right now.” His office said Thursday he would be in Uvalde rather than at the NRA event, instead recording remarks for them by video, according to The Dallas Morning News.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., denounced Abbott as an “absolute fraud” ahead of the NRA event.
With Congress in the early stages of another bipartisan negotiation on possible gun legislation, Abbott stressed this week that he sees the Uvalde shooting as an issue of mental health, not guns — echoing Cruz and other conservative officials in contending gun laws are misplaced.
President Trump, who has embraced gun rights lobbyists despite occasional criticism, said in a Gab social media post earlier this week that “America needs real solutions and real leadership in this moment, not politicians and partisanship. That’s why I will keep my longtime commitment to speak in Texas at the NRA Convention and deliver an important address to America. In the meantime, we all continue to pray for the victims, their families and for our entire nation — we are all in this together!”
The NRA and other gun rights organizations are under renewed scrutiny amid a string of deadly public shootings. Earlier this month, 10 people were killed in a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, in what law enforcement described as a racially motivated attack by a suspected white supremacist. Days later, a gunman opened fire at a California church, killing one person and wounding five others; authorities have said that alleged shooter was driven by the political tension between China and Taiwan.
In Uvalde this week, 17 people were injured in addition to the 21 who were fatally shot, authorities said. A motive in that attack is not yet clear.
“When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” President Joe Biden said after the latest tragedy. Democrats have limited options to pursue gun regulations given they don’t have the votes needed to squash a Republican-led filibuster in the Senate. The GOP has consistently said they won’t back sweeping changes to the law, citing their views on the Second Amendment, but some Republican lawmakers support more incremental measures such as expanding background checks.
How influential is the NRA today?
The NRA has been mired in internal strife in recent years. In 2019, it parted ways with its longtime marketing partner, Ackerman McQueen, and lobbyist Chris Cox.
Then last year, the group filed for bankruptcy and tried to reorganize in Texas after New York Attorney General Letitia James raised allegations of financial misconduct. The NRA said then that James had launched an “unconstitutional, premeditated attack” and that it was “committed to good governance.”
A federal judge later dismissed the bankruptcy case, leaving the group to face James’ lawsuit. She is seeking to recoup money that was allegedly misspent as well as ban NRA President Wayne LaPierre and other executives from serving in the leadership of any not-for-profit organization conducting business in the state.
Amid its scandals, the NRA spent $25 million less in the 2020 election cycle than it did in 2016, according to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit tracking data on campaign finance and lobbying. The gun group spent more than $54 million across federal races during Trump’s first campaign, in 2016, compared to $29 million four years later.
In the 2022 election cycle so far, the NRA has spent less than $10,000 on independent expenditures, OpenSecrets Executive Director Sheila Krumholz told ABC News.
But Adam Winkler, a University of California, Los Angeles, law professor who specializes in gun policy, told ABC News the NRA is still a powerful political force after decades of shaping public attitudes on firearms.
“The NRA has been immensely successful at persuading Americans that if you’re feeling in danger, you should have a gun,” Winkler said.
Gun sales hit a record high of 21 million in 2020, driven in part by first-time purchases. In 2021, sales hit their second highest number at 19 million.
The NRA has also been aided by a large constituency of very strong pro-gun voters who are “fighting for the same vision of gun rights,” Winkler said. Other organizations, such as Gun Owners of America, are stepping in to fill any gaps.
OpenSecrets reported last week that gun rights groups spent a record $15.8 million on lobbying in 2021 — more than five times the amount opposing gun control groups spent. The NRA alone spent $4.4 million on lobbying, up from its $2.2 million the year before.
“The gun rights forces in America are so powerful that another school shooting with an obscene number of deaths will likely not lead to significant new federal gun laws,” Winkler said.
ABC News’ Monica Escobedo contributed to this report.
(UVALDE, Texas) — During a press conference this week, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott blamed the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde on mental health issues.
Abbott explained that law enforcement believes what’s behind these types of attacks is a growing prevalence of people with mental health issues and the need for more mental health support, not lax gun laws.
“We as a state, we as a society need to do a better job with mental health,” the Republican governor said Wednesday. “Anybody who shoots somebody else has a mental health challenge. Period. We as a government need to find a way to target that mental health challenge and to do something about it.”
However, advocates said the state has missed plenty of opportunities to address mental health.
The governor has diverted money away from agencies in Texas that oversee mental health programs and recent reports have found Texas is the worst state in the nation when it comes to providing access to mental health care, they say.
“Based on what we know about [the shooter], we cannot come to a formal conclusion that he had a mental illness,” Greg Hansch, executive director of the Texas chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, told ABC News.
Abbott admitted during the conference that the 18-year-old suspected gunman in the Uvalde shooting, Salvador Ramos, did not have a diagnosed mental illness or a known criminal background, but rejected the idea that stricter gun laws would have prevented the shooting.
Debra Plotnick, executive vice president for state and federal advocacy at the nonprofit Mental Health America (MHA), said officials and the public often blame mental health when there is violence in a community.
“When we have a situation like this where people end up dead, it’s very easy to point fingers at mental health, in particular,” she said. “It’s a historic scapegoat and it’s still the case. But hate is not a mental illness … Having a mental health condition does not make someone violent.”
In fact, some critics said the state has not supported efforts to expand mental health care.
Texas is ‘worst in nation’ in mental health care access: Report
In April, Abbott announced he would be moving nearly $500 million from state agencies to fund Operation Lone Star, a Texas-Mexico border security initiative jointly being conducted by the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas Military Department.
Of that amount, $210.7 million was from Texas Health & Human Services, which oversees public mental health programs.
In a statement to ABC News, Abbott’s press secretary, Renae Eze, denied that the governor cut any funding from mental health services.
“This is a completely inaccurate, unsubstantiated narrative being spun by those trying to politicize a tragedy,” she wrote. “Governor Abbott did not, in no uncertain terms, cut funding from mental health services being provided for Texans. Governor Abbott has always worked diligently to fully fund and expand mental health programs and services for Texans.”
Eze added the Health & Human Services Commission requested to transfer funs because otherwise, they would lapse at the end of the fiscal year.
“HHSC confirmed in the same letter that the agency and its programs, including mental health programs and services, would not be negatively impacted by the transfer,” she wrote.
The MHA’s most recent State of Mental Health in America report found that Texas ranked last in the nation when it comes to access to mental care.
The report said nine measures made up the ranking including adults and youth with mental illnesses who couldn’t receive care, are uninsured or didn’t have insurance to cover care as well as the mental workforce availability.
“We have the highest uninsured rate in the nation and the most people uninsured.” Hansch said. “That certainly doesn’t help individuals with mental health conditions access care.”
The report adds to a growing body of evidence that Texans are not receiving mental health care. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, nearly 70% of adults in Texas with mild mental illness did not receive mental health care leading up to the pandemic, as well as 57.4% of those with moderate mental illness and 44.7% of those with severe mental illness.
Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke confronted Abbott briefly during the press conference Wednesday over his comments before being escorted from the auditorium.
Outside, the former U.S. representative held an impromptu press conference during which he criticized Abbott and referenced the MHA report.
“He said mental health’s what’s broken here?” O’Rourke said. “We’re 50th in the nation in mental health care access. 50th. There are only 50 states in the nation. We are dead last.”
He continued, “He’s refused to expand Medicaid, which would bring $10 billion a year including mental health care access for people who need it … For the governor to say this is a mental healthcare issue and do nothing to improve mental health care access, we’re 50th in the nation. This shows that he is in large part to blame for what we see.”
Following the confrontation, Abbott avoided responding to O’Rourke’s claims in detail and called for unity in light of the tragedy. “We need to not focus on ourselves and our agendas, we need to focus on the healing and hope that we are providing to those who suffered unconscionable damage to their lives,” he said.
‘Addressing mental health isn’t going to end mass shootings’
This is not to say Texas hasn’t done anything to address mental health.
Following a shooting at Santa Fe High School in 2018 that killed 10 people, Abbott signed a series of bills that, among other things, sought to improve mental health access.
One bill created the Texas Child Mental Health Care Consortium to train primary care providers in mental health practices as well as provide counseling and psychiatric services to children. Another bill increased mental health training for teachers and other school officials.
Texas HHS also offers Mental First Aid training, during which participants are taught to recognize the signs and symptoms of mental health conditions.
Additionally, HHSC issues a quarterly report on waiting lists for mental health services and revealed plans last year to add 350 new inpatient psychiatric beds at the state hospitals within the next four years.
“Those are good steps and important,” Dr. Octavio Martinez, director of the University of Texas’ Hogg Foundation for Mental Health, told ABC News. “But we’ve been growing very significantly, we’ve been outstripping these resources because of the tremendous population growth needed in the public mental health system.”
Community advocates also want to see more school-based mental health centers, more school counselors and investments in mental health crisis services, which can help reach people who are in need or experiencing a mental health episode.
Even if Texas does divert more resources to mental health programs, experts said that won’t necessarily drive mass shootings down.
“Doing a better job addressing mental health isn’t going to end or even substantially reduce mass shootings,” Hansch said. “We should address mental health because doing so vastly increases the odds of recovery.”
He added, “It saves significant downstream costs for taxpayers, it’s a basic human right, and it saves lives that might otherwise be lost to suicide or co-morbid conditions.”
Illustration by Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — Described by its inventors as a “social live-streaming platform” that allows its mostly teenage users to make friends worldwide, join communities and even find a date, Yubo has emerged as part of the investigation into the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, because the suspect sent messages through the app, investigators and users told ABC News.
Launched in 2015 by a French company, Yubo has quickly become known as a go-to site for mostly “Gen Z” users to meet, make new friends and join online communities. In 2019, Seventeen magazine also listed the site as among the seven best dating apps for teenagers.
“Yubo is a social app for Gen Z that allows them to connect and interact with people all over the world through live streaming,” a spokesperson for the platform said in a statement to ABC News. “Yubo gives this generation a space to socialize through one-to-few audio and video conversations, games and chat, and empowers its 60 million users to connect safely and without the pressure of likes or follows.”
Yubo even has separate areas of its app reserved for teenagers. Users who join and say they are between the ages of 13 to 17 are put into different “communities” and supposedly can’t interact with other users who say they are over 18, according to the platform.
Yubo appears to work like a blend of livestreaming social apps like Clubhouse and Twitch, mixed with adult social media and dating apps like Tinder that allow users to swipe through individual profiles. The app lets users make friends, send direct messages, swipe between users, and join livestreams, either video or audio.
But multiple users told ABC News that they believe accused Uvalde mass shooter Salvador Ramos had a more sinister use for the platform.
Two users claimed Ramos allegedly committed animal abuse and displayed videos of the cruelty on Yubo.
An individual who claimed to have known the accused gunman through the social media platform told ABC News that Ramos turned on his video last week on the platform and showed himself with guns and allegedly made statements, including “wait till tomorrow.”
“No one took him seriously,” another user told ABC News.
A law enforcement source said detectives probing the Uvalde mass shooting are aware of a Yubo account believed to have belonged to the accused gunman but can’t definitively confirm the account belongs to the suspect. ABC News has not independently verified that the alleged account belonged to the accused shooter.
“Our thoughts and deepest sympathies are with the families of the victims of the tragic shooting in Uvalde, Texas,” the Yubo spokesperson said. “Due to privacy regulations, we are not able to release specific user information outside of direct requests from law enforcement.”
Just days after his 18th birthday, Ramos allegedly killed 19 students, most just 10 years old, and two faculty members Tuesday at Robb Elementary School in the small rural town west of San Antonio. The suspect was fatally shot by law enforcement officers.
Moments before carrying out the deadly attack, the accused gunman allegedly sent a string of messages to a young girl he met on Yubo, detailing that he had shot his grandmother and was heading to the school for his next target, according to messages reviewed by ABC News.
The messages allegedly show the accused gunman texted with a 15-year-old girl in Germany. He allegedly described an argument he had with his grandmother over a phone bill.
“She’s on the phone with AT&T,” Ramos allegedly wrote at 11:06 a.m. on Tuesday, about a half-hour before the attack at the school, apparently referring to his grandmother with a derogatory term. In another message, he allegedly said, “Ima do something to her rn (right now).”
Moments later, he allegedly wrote, “I shot my grandmother in the head.” He then allegedly wrote, “ima go shoot up a elementary school rn.”
The young girl who allegedly received messages from the Texas gunman moments before his rampage told ABC News Thursday that she has been asking herself “what if I could change the outcome” since seeing the news that her friend had committed the school massacre.
The girl, who asked to be referred to as “Cece,” said, “Ever since May 24th I have been guilt tripping myself, what if I could change the outcome, what if I could change his mind to not do this. I was too dumb to realize why he bought two rifles on his birthday, May 16th, and ordered a package full with ammunition, not knowing what he was going to do with it.”
Cece said she met Ramos on May 9 on Yubo, where they would “join each others live” streams.
While in a previous interview with the New York Times Cece said she read the messages from the gunman “as soon as he sent them,” which would have been minutes before the shooting, she now tells ABC News she “misspoke” and that she only saw them “hours later.”
Cece, who said she and Ramos exchanged cellphone numbers and spoke regularly, claimed there were other warning signs in hindsight, including that the suspected gunman would ask others on Yubo “if they would want to be famous on the news.”
At a news conference on Wednesday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott referenced similar messages the gunman sent just prior to the school rampage, but misrepresented them as “Facebook posts” when they were instead private “one-to-one text messages,” according to a spokesperson for Meta, the parent company of Facebook.
(NEW YORK) — Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “special military operation” into neighboring Ukraine began on Feb. 24, with Russian forces invading from Belarus, to the north, and Russia, to the east. Ukrainian troops have offered “stiff resistance,” according to U.S. officials.
The Russian military has since launched a full-scale ground offensive in eastern Ukraine’s disputed Donbas region, capturing the strategic port city of Mariupol and securing a coastal corridor to the Moscow-annexed Crimean Peninsula.
Here’s how the news is developing. All times Eastern:
May 27, 7:08 am
Bucha resident who lost husband, unborn son tries to rebuild her life
Anna Polonska had struggled to get pregnant. So when she did, it was a moment of sheer joy; a happy family life lay ahead.
But days after Russia invaded Ukraine, her unborn son and husband were killed in shelling as they tried to flee Ukraine, she told ABC News.
She was also gravely injured in the attack, and doctors did not think she would survive.
Adding to her loss, soldiers stole almost all of her possessions and destroyed her apartment, she recalled.
But in a remarkable interview, Anna said she is now focusing on picking up the pieces — showing incredible courage and determination to live and walk again.
At least 3,998 civilians have been killed and 4,693 others have been injured in Ukraine since Russian forces invaded on Feb. 24, according to the latest figures from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
At least 260 children were among the dead and 404 among the injured, according to the OHCHR.
“Most of the civilian casualties recorded were caused by the use of explosive weapons with a wide impact area, including shelling from heavy artillery and multiple launch rocket systems, and missile and air strikes,” the agency said in a statement Thursday. “OHCHR believes that the actual figures are considerably higher, as the receipt of information from some locations where intense hostilities have been going on has been delayed and many reports are still pending corroboration.”
Those areas include Mariupol in the Donetsk Oblast, Izium in the Kharkiv Oblast and Popasna in the Luhansk Oblast, where the OHCHR said “there are allegations of numerous civilian casualties.” Casualty numbers from those locations “are being further corroborated” and thus are not included in the latest statistics, according to the agency.
May 26, 6:06 am
Russia’s airborne forces suffer ‘heavy casualties’ after ‘tactical failures,’ UK says
The Russian military’s airborne forces, known as the VDV, “have been heavily involved in several notable tactical failures since the start of Russia’s invasion” of neighboring Ukraine, according to the U.K. Ministry of Defense.
“This includes the attempted advance on Kyiv via Hostomel Airfield in March, the stalled progress on the Izium axis since April, and the recent failed and costly crossings of the Siverskyi Donets River,” the ministry said Thursday in an intelligence update.
“Russian doctrine anticipates assigning the VDV to some of the most demanding operations,” the ministry added. “The 45,000-strong VDV is mostly comprised of professional contract soldiers. Its members enjoy elite status and attract additional pay. The VDV has been employed on missions better suited to heavier armoured infantry and has sustained heavy casualties during the campaign.”
The VDV’s “mixed performance likely reflects a strategic mismanagement of this capability and Russia’s failure to secure air superiority,” according to the ministry.
“The misemployment of the VDV in Ukraine highlights how Putin’s significant investment in the armed forces over the last 15 years has resulted in an unbalanced overall force,” the ministry said. “The failure to anticipate Ukrainian resistance and the subsequent complacency of Russian commanders has led to significant losses across many of Russia’s more elite units.”
May 24, 4:47 pm
Drone footage shows devastation inside Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol
Drone footage released by Russian media shows the devastation inside the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, Ukraine, where Ukrainian forces fended off Russian troops for weeks amid intense fighting before surrendering.
The drone footage released by the Russian news outlet MIC Izvestia showed the collapsed walls of the plant and twisted metal and debris strewn about the entire facility.
The Russian Defense ministry on Friday said the last Ukrainian fighters defending Azovstal had surrendered, giving Russia full control of the port city of Mariupol.
The seizure of Mariupol, gives Russia command of a land route linking the Crimean Peninsula, which Moscow seized in 2014, with mainland Russia and parts of eastern Ukraine held by pro-Russian separatists.
Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
(UVALDE, Texas) — In the days and weeks before one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history, the accused Robb Elementary gunman appears to have sent disturbing messages — including claims about intentions of violence at school — to numerous young people he met online, leaving a trail of digital red flags that appears to have gone unnoticed.
Over a dozen people tell ABC News that the accused gunman, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, sent them concerning messages, across multiple social media platforms, in the days leading up to the massacre.
Hours before the massacre, Ramos allegedly messaged a young girl on Instagram saying that he had a secret he wanted to tell her, according to messages reviewed by ABC News, the contents of which law enforcement sources say are part of the ongoing investigation into the shooting. Ramos had allegedly tagged the girl in a photo of two guns days earlier.
In another message allegedly sent the morning of the shooting, Ramos sent a photo of a gun lying on a bed, according to a user who shared direct messages from the suspect’s alleged account with ABC News. She replied, asking, “Why’d u send me a pic of a gun.”
And moments before the attack, the accused gunman allegedly sent a string of messages to a young girl in Germany who he had met on the social media app Yubo, detailing that he had shot his grandmother and was heading to the school for his next target, according to messages reviewed by ABC News.
In an interview with ABC News, the young girl, who asked to be referred to as “Cece,” said that since the shooting she has been asking herself, “What if I could change the outcome, what if I could change his mind to not do this?” Cece said she regretted not putting together why Ramos had “bought two rifles on his birthday, May 16, and ordered a package full with ammunitions.”
Cece said that, in hindsight, there were also other warning signs — including the fact that Ramos asked others on Yubo if they wanted to be famous.
Another user on Instagram showed ABC News alleged messages from Ramos saying his preferred weapon is the AR-15, which was the assault weapon used in the Texas shooting.
A week before the shooting, Ramos sent another Yubo user a message telling her he would make her famous if she followed him back on Instagram, according to messages reviewed by ABC News.
And another young user told ABC News that the Ramos was on Yubo the day before the massacre and that he implied that something would occur the next day.
That user, who lives in Greece and asked to remain anonymous, told ABC News she tried to report Ramos to Yubo — but that “regardless of how many times he was reported … he would still come back.”
A spokesperson for Yubo, when asked by ABC News if Ramos’ account had been flagged, said that “at this stage, we are not legally able to release any specific user information outside of direct requests from law enforcement.”
The company “can confirm that we are investigating an account that has since been banned from the platform” the Yubo spokesperson said. “We are deeply saddened by this unspeakable loss and are fully cooperating with law enforcement on their investigation.”
The majority of the users who Ramos allegedly messaged in the days leading up to the shooting told ABC News that they were first contacted by him on Yubo, which has been described as a dating app for teens. The users he communicated with are predominantly high-school age. Most said they did not report the messages and didn’t take them seriously.
In the weeks leading up to the deadly attack, Ramos also appeared to have made efforts to meet some of the users he had met on Yubo in person, according to messages shown to ABC News.
“He was supposed to meet up with me,” a young girl told ABC News before expressing relief. “I just never really texted him back.”
The user showed ABC News messages allegedly showing that Ramos had planned to meet up with her in late April.
“He would mostly follow girls who he thought were attractive,” another Yubo user told ABC News. “And asked to meet up with them.”
(UVALDE, Texas) — The mothers of Rojelio Torres and Tess Mata, two 10-year-olds killed in the Texas elementary school shooting, spoke with ABC News about their heartbreak.
“Two of my sons go to that school, but I only got one back,” said Evadulia Orta, the mother of Rojelio and three other children.
At least 19 children and two teachers were killed after a gunman opened fire at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, west of San Antonio, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety. Rojelio was described by his mother as a “very smart and loving child.”
“I’m going to miss him because he was my life,” said Orta. “All my kids are my life, but losing that little piece of my heart, I lost my son.”
Several families were left waiting at a local civic center to hear whether or not their children had survived the attack. Among them were Orta as well as Veronica Mata, the mother of 10-year-old Tess, who was killed.
Tess’ father, Jerry Mata, was originally at the school, desperate to go inside and find his daughter, but was held back by law enforcement. At the civic center, law enforcement corralled all the families that still had missing children and had them wait.
The family says dozens of people were waiting in one big room, pacing and crying for hours before being called up by law enforcement and notified.
Orta said she was waiting for her child to be bussed to the civic center until the last bus came: “They said, ‘There’s a bus coming, there’s a last bus coming.’ It never came.”
She checked hospitals near Uvalde and in San Antonio, but there was no word of her son.
The Mata family says they are angry nothing has been done by politicians to prevent such shootings, and they say they haven’t gotten any information from police about the investigation into the attack.
Their daughter Tess is described by the family as a bubbly little girl who loved to dance and had dreams of being TikTok famous.
“She deserves to be remembered,” Veronica Mata said. “She put a smile on everybody’s face every time she was always dancing. She always had the biggest smile ever. So I want her to be remembered, for the awesome little girl that she was.”
ABC News’ James Scholz and Nery Ynclan contributed to this report.
