‘I have kids in school’: Uvalde shooting evokes emotional reactions

Saskatchewan Roughriders defensive end Pete Robertson was thinking of his young family back home in Texas on Wednesday.

Robertson’s hometown of Longview is more than 435 miles from Uvalde — site of a school shooting Tuesday that killed 19 children — but he has three kids aged eight and under.

“It’s hard to make comments because people act in ways that we cannot control; only God knows,” Robertson told 980 CJME’s Britton Gray after the Roughriders held a training-camp workout in Saskatoon.

“I just send prayers out to all the families and the children that were harmed and the teacher and the person’s grandma. It put everyone in a frenzy being from there — and I have kids in school.”

Flowers are placed around a welcome sign outside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas on May 25, 2022, to honour the victims killed in Tuesday’s shooting at the school. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

An 18-year-old man named Salvador Ramos walked into Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, barricaded himself in a classroom and opened fire.

By the time he was shot and killed by law enforcement officials, Ramos had murdered 19 Grade 4 students and two teachers, and injured 17 other people.

He also shot his grandmother before going to the school.

About 30 minutes before the shooting, Ramos sent three social media messages. According to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, Ramos posted that he was going to shoot his grandmother, that he had shot the woman, and that he was going to shoot up an elementary school.

Facebook and Instagram are co-operating with investigators as they review the suspect’s accounts. The Associated Press said the accounts show pictures of Ramos holding a magazine of bullets and then a picture of two semi-automatic rifles.

Abbott told a media conference that Ramos didn’t have a known criminal or mental health history.

Beto O’Rourke, who’s running against Abbott for governor, interrupted the media conference and called the shooting “totally predictable when you choose not to do anything.”

Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said to O’Rourke: “You’re out of line and an embarrassment.”

The shooting is the deadliest at an elementary school in the United States since Dec. 14, 2012, when a gunman killed 26 people at a school in Newtown, Conn.

The mass murder in Uvalde occurred 10 days after a shooting at a Buffalo supermarket that killed 10 people, and five days after two people were killed and seven were injured outside a McDonalds in Chicago.

“At the end of the day, always be aware of your surroundings,” the Roughriders’ Robertson said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re at school, a grocery store or church, just prepare yourself. You never know.”

— With files from The Canadian Press