Ramos posted a self-portrait taken in front of a mirror on his social networks. /
Everyone would like to know what went through his head, but Adriana Martínez Reyes asks that “please, do not judge him”
No one can think of what motives Salvador Ramos might have for buying a couple of assault rifles and shooting up an 8- to 10-year-old boy he found at an elementary school. Except for his mother, Adriana Martínez Reyes.
Intercepted by Televisa cameras at the exit of a church where she was seeking consolation, the woman apologized to the families of the children killed by her son. “Forgive me, forgive my son, I know he has his reasons,” she said with a trembling voice and red eyes. In looking deep into the soul of her society, Americans blame lax gun laws, poor police performance, poor mental health and, finally, the broken home she lived in.
Everyone would like to know what was on his mind, but his mother didn’t provide many clues either. “I don’t know what he was thinking, he had his reasons for doing what he did and please don’t judge him or me.” She, who has also been missing a son since Tuesday, comes up more than anyone asking her neighbors “to get closer to their children instead of paying attention to the other bad things,” she asked introspectively. “I don’t know, I have no words,” she excused herself, always in Spanish.
In that last thing they pay attention to him. Since Tuesday, María Rivera has constantly hugged her eight-year-old boy, in case one of those hugs turns out to be her last. She did not know Adriana, but she did know her mother, Celia, who lives a few blocks away and was the young man’s first victim. That morning the young man had argued with his grandmother about paying her mobile phone bill, like two months earlier with her mother for disconnecting the internet. Video games were his whole world.
The boy’s mother never imagined that there was violence behind the shifty gaze and introverted character that made her boyfriend, Juan Álvarez, uncomfortable, who described Salvador’s relationship with his mother as “tumultuous” to NBC, although she denies it. «It was weird, I never got along with him, nor did I socialize with him. When you tried to talk to him he would just sit there and then he would leave.”
His father hadn’t seen him in over a month either. “I never expected my son to do something like this,” Salvador Ramos, the same name as his son, told The Daily Beast. “He should have killed me, you know, instead of doing something like that to someone.” What is clear is that Adriana Martínez did not have much luck with the men who passed through her life. Her ex-husband has a record of domestic abuse and, according to various sources, was not a part of the boy’s life, whom she describes as a good person. In recent months she said she had seen changes in him. She bought some boxing gloves and practiced in the park. She stopped going to class. She had a defiant attitude. “I told him: Mijo, one day someone is going to kick your ass.”
Maybe they already had. In class they ridiculed him for the way he dressed and insulted him with homophobic nicknames for painting his eyes. His father blames his ex-wife for not buying her clothes, but Adriana worked as a waitress in a Mexican restaurant in town and she didn’t seem to have much means. The pants with chains and zippers that the boy always wore made him a target for others.
Since his fight with his mother, he had slept on a mattress on the floor at his grandparents’ house, where Rolando Reyes had tried unsuccessfully to convince him to go to class, he told Newsy. He never imagined that he had weapons at home, he could have found a mess for him, because as a former prisoner he couldn’t have them under his roof. On Friday his class was going to graduate, without him. The ceremony has been postponed indefinitely, nobody has anything to celebrate anymore.