The mother of the Uvalde shooter begged the public to forgive her son, saying in a television interview that she doesn’t know what prompted him to murder 21 people and injure 17 others at a Texas elementary school this week, KSAT-TV reports.
“I have no words to say, I don’t know what he was thinking,” Adriana Martinez, the mother of Salvador Ramos, said in Spanish to the television station Televisa, according to CNN.
“He had his reasons for doing what he did, and please don’t judge him. I only want the innocent children who died to forgive me.”
“What do you tell their families?” a reporter asked in response.
“Forgive me, forgive my son. I know he had his reasons,” Martinez said, according to Televisa.
Martinez spoke with the television station while she was in her car, at times crying.
In a follow-up question, the reporter asked what reasons the 18-year-old Ramos might have had for the slayings.
Martinez replied, “To get closer to those children instead of paying attention to the other bad things. I have no words. I don’t know,” Televisa reports.
On Tuesday, Ramos shot his grandmother in the face and then drove to Robb Elementary School, where he slaughtered school children and teachers before police eventually shot and killed him.
Martinez previously has said that her son was not a violent person, but she did acknowledge in an interview with ABC News that sometimes she felt “uneasy” around him and that he would become aggressive at times.
“I had an uneasy feeling sometimes, like ‘what are you up to?'” the woman told ABC News. “He can be aggressive . . . if he really got mad.”
She added: “We all have a rage, that some people have it more than others.”
Martinez also expressed sympathy for the victims in the interview with ABC News.
“Those kids… I have no words,” Reyes told the news network while in tears. “I don’t know what to say about those poor kids.”
The teen was living with his grandparents at the time of the shooting, reportedly because he “had problems” with his mother, according to the New York Post.
In an interview with the Post, a neighbor had kind words to say about Ramos’ grandparents, telling the newspaper that they were diligent role models.
“The grandpa is a very hardworking man and it’s sad some people are blaming him for what happened. Grandma was always cleaning the yard, fixing things all the time,” the neighbor told the Post. “She just built a little tiny house on the property that was just completed a few months ago. I feel for them. I see some people bashing them and it’s not fair.”
As for Ramos’ father, he has acknowledged not playing much of a role in his son’s life, telling the Daily Beast that he works a distance from Uvalde. The father asserted that the pandemic has caused him to stay away from his son because he did not want risk exposure to his mother, who has cancer. Ramos reportedly refused to speak with his father within the last month.
“I never expected my son to do something like that,” the father told the Daily Beast. “He should’ve just killed me, you know, instead of doing something like that to someone.”
The father told the news outlet that his son dropped out of high school after he was bullied because of his clothes.
“He was a quiet person, stuck to himself. He didn’t bother nobody. People were always bothering him,” the father told the news outlet.
The father added that he is “sorry [for] what my son did,” according to the Daily Beast.
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[Featured image: Salvador Ramos/Facebook]
