A woman who claims to have been the girlfriend of the Uvalde mass shooter has been arrested in Puerto Rico over alleged threats to Uvalde residents, including the mother of a victim of the Robb Elementary School massacre.
Victoria Gabriela Rodriguez-Morales, 19, lived in Uvalde until 2020 and allegedly has been making threats against residents of the city since at least 2018, court records show.
Last week, the FBI arrested her in Puerto Rico, accusing her of continuing to make online threats and harassing the families of victims of the Robb Elementary shooting. In a filing Wednesday, federal prosecutors asked a judge to keep her incarcerated without setting bail.
“Since 2018, Defendant has engaged in a pattern of threats directed at institutions (including a children’s hospital and schools) in Texas and at law enforcement involved in the investigation of her repeated threats,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeanette M. Collazo-Ortiz said in a court motion. “At least one of her threats resulted in the temporary closing of a school in Texas, disrupting the lives of teachers, students and parents.”
Rodriguez-Morales allegedly began making threats when she was sent to a juvenile detention center in Texas.
“During her detention, on or about 2018, she sent email threats to kill public officials, shoot schools, and kill teachers and students,” an FBI agent said in a court affidavit. “Per official documents related to the case, Rodriguez-Morales admitted the conduct.”
As a condition for her release from juvenile supervision, she and her family relocated to Puerto Rico in May 2020, the affidavit said.
But the threats didn’t stop.
“The pattern of threats directed at Uvalde officials and institutions continued throughout the years 2020, 2021, 2022, and continue to take place in 2023,” the affidavit for her arrest said.
In September 2020, Rodriguez-Morales allegedly sent threatening emails and used her mother’s and another relative’s phones to repeatedly call the Uvalde police and fire departments, Uvalde High School, Morales Junior High School, and the Texas Department of Public Safety, according to the affidavit.
Many of her alleged threats referred to the mass shooting committed by Salvador Ramos, who killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary on May 24, 2022. The threats were sent by email, social media posts, and direct messages to people in Uvalde, Dilley, and other towns and counties near Uvalde.
In some of them, Rodriguez-Morales said she was Ramos’ former girlfriend and that they’d planned to commit the massacre together — though he didn’t wait for her.
A law enforcement source familiar with Rodriguez-Morales said her claims, like many others Texas Rangers investigated, were untrue. It was one of several stories she concocted, the source said.
She allegedly made some of her threats and claims on Instagram and Facebook, the FBI affidavit said. In one Facebook post, she claimed to have warned Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, who was the chief of Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District’s police department, four days before Ramos committed the massacre.
“When????? Its gonna be surprise,” the post said.
The law enforcement source said there was no evidence Rodriguez-Morales contacted Arredondo to warn him of the impending shooting at Robb Elementary.
Arredondo, who was considered the on-scene commander at the school that day, was fired in August 2022 in the fallout over a flawed, slow-moving police response to the massacre.
Another post said Rodriguez-Morales would haunt everyone in the graduating classes of 2022 and 2023.
The FBI, which worked the case with help from the Secret Service, obtained search warrants for social media and email accounts linked to Rodriguez-Morales, some of which originated from a school she attends in Puerto Rico.
Her parents met with federal prosecutors and investigators while Rodriguez-Morales was still a juvenile in 2022 and noted that she had been receiving mental health treatment. But her mother expressed skepticism that her daughter had made the threats.
In some cases, Rodriguez-Morales made them with borrowed phones, investigators said.
“These criminal charges are a last resort of the Government in a years-long effort to deter Defendant’s terrorizing of Uvalde residents,” prosecutor Collazo-Ortiz said in a motion to detain Rodriguez-Morales. “The Government has sought other means, short of criminal charges, including repeatedly alerting the family to the repeated threats by Defendant and making them aware of resources that could assist Defendant. But these did not stop Defendant’s threats of violence.”