The 18-year-old Uvalde shooter messaged someone on Instagram that “I got a lil secret” just hours before he gunned down 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School, according to a screenshot of messages posted on the social media site.
Three days before the attack, an Instagram account linked to shooter Salvador Ramos posted a photo of two rifles lying on a carpet. The story tagged another Instagram account by name in the photo.
The owner of the tagged Instagram account wrote in a story posted after the shooting that Ramos had tagged her and messaged her out of the blue.
The girl, who did not include her name on her account and has since made her account private, posted a series of screenshots of messages that she said she exchanged with the shooter in the days before the massacre.
“what your guns gotta do with me?” she asked him, according to the screenshots. “i’m so confused.”
“Be grateful I tagged you,” Ramos told her, the screenshots showed, and she replied: “i barely know you and u tag me in a picture with some guns.”
In another message that appeared to be sent the morning of the shooting, Ramos wrote “I’m about to” – but didn’t say what he would do. “I got a lil secret,” he wrote in another message. “I wanna tell u.”
In messages posted to her story before it went private, the girl said that she didn’t live in Texas and didn’t know Ramos.
“the only reason i responded to him was because i was afraid of him i wish i stayed awake to at least try to convince him to not commit his crime,” she wrote. “I didnt know.”
