How Salvador Ramos Died: Border Patrol Breach and 77-Minute Delay

Salvador Ramos, the 18-year-old gunman at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, died on May 24, 2022, when a U.S. Border Patrol tactical team shot and killed him inside classroom 111. How Salvador Ramos died has been documented in detail by federal and state investigators: he was killed roughly 77 minutes after he first entered the school, ending a massacre in which he murdered 19 children and two teachers.

The Border Patrol Breach That Killed Him

At 12:50 p.m., members of a Border Patrol tactical unit known as BORTAC breached the door to classroom 111 using keys obtained from a school janitor. Ramos emerged from a closet and opened fire. The officers shot him dead inside the classroom.¹

The BORTAC agents carried out the breach without seeking permission from the on-scene incident commander, Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District police chief Pete Arredondo.² The specific agents who fired the fatal shots have not been publicly identified.³

BORTAC (Border Patrol Tactical Unit) is a specialized federal law enforcement team. The unit was part of a response that eventually drew 376 officers to the scene, including 149 Border Patrol agents and 91 Texas Department of Public Safety troopers, along with local police.⁴

Why It Took 77 Minutes

The first officers entered the school at 11:36 a.m., just three minutes after Ramos. After encountering gunfire, they retreated and did not re-enter the classrooms. For the next 77 minutes, hundreds of officers gathered at the scene while Ramos remained inside with 33 students and three teachers.¹

Investigators concluded that officers abandoned active-shooter protocols and treated the situation as a barricaded-subject standoff. A Texas House investigative committee released an interim report in July 2022 finding “systemic failures and egregious poor decision making.” The report noted that Arredondo, designated as incident commander in the district’s safety plan, did not consider himself to be in that role and failed to establish or transfer command.⁵

In January 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice released a review conducted by its COPS Office over 54 days on-site, with more than 260 interviews and 14,000 pieces of evidence. The DOJ called the response a “failure” driven by breakdowns in leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy, and training. Attorney General Merrick Garland said officers who arrived within minutes had intended to storm the classrooms but were ordered to stand down, and that the “refusal to rapidly confront the killer needlessly cost lives.”⁶

Governor Greg Abbott initially told the public that officers had “rapidly devised a plan, stacked up and neutralized the attacker” in 40 minutes, a claim the Texas House committee deemed false.⁵

What Ramos Did Before He Was Killed

At 11:28 a.m., Ramos crashed his vehicle into a ravine near Robb Elementary School. He exited armed with a Daniel Defense AR-15-style rifle, fired at two witnesses near a nearby funeral home, hopped a fence, and approached the school. At 11:33 a.m., he entered through a west-side door that was closed but unlocked and made his way into connected fourth-grade classrooms 111 and 112, where he opened fire.⁷

Within his first four minutes inside, Ramos fired more than 100 rounds. He continued shooting at intervals, with additional gunfire recorded as late as 12:21 p.m., roughly half an hour before officers finally breached the room.⁷ By the time he was killed, Ramos had murdered 19 students, most of them 10 years old, and two teachers, Irma Garcia, 48, and Eva Mireles, 44.⁸ Seventeen other people were injured, and some students survived by remaining still and pretending to be dead while trapped in the classrooms for over an hour.⁹

Who Salvador Ramos Was

Ramos turned 18 on May 16, 2022, eight days before the attack. He had grown up in Uvalde and attended Robb Elementary as a child. A former teacher once described him as a “wonderful student,” but by middle school his life had deteriorated significantly.¹⁰

He was bullied over a stutter, his clothing, and his haircut as early as elementary school. He was flagged as “at-risk” in the third or fourth grade due to poor test results but never received special education services. Starting around 2018, he accumulated more than 100 absences per year and was involuntarily withdrawn from Uvalde High School in the fall of 2021 after completing only the ninth grade. He then moved out of his mother’s house and went to live with his grandmother, whose home sat blocks from Robb Elementary.¹⁰

A former girlfriend described Ramos as “lonely and depressed” and said he told her he did not believe he would live past 18. He was fired from jobs at Whataburger and Wendy’s in 2021, one termination reportedly for threatening a female coworker. Peers had taken to calling him “school shooter” because of his fixation on violence.¹¹ He shared beheading videos online, pointed BB guns at people from a vehicle, made graphic threats toward female gamers, and collected news articles about the Buffalo supermarket mass shooting that had occurred 10 days before his own attack.¹⁰

In April 2022, Ramos messaged an acquaintance: “Are you still gonna remember me in 50 something days?” and followed up with “we’ll see in may.” Shortly before the attack, he messaged a teenager in Germany saying he had shot his grandmother and was about to “shoot up” an elementary school. None of these warning signs were reported to law enforcement before the attack.¹⁰

How He Got the Guns

Ramos legally purchased two AR-style rifles from a federally licensed dealer in the Uvalde area in the days after his 18th birthday. The first rifle was bought on May 17, 2022, one day after he turned 18. He purchased 375 rounds of ammunition the next day and a second rifle on May 20. One of the weapons was manufactured by Daniel Defense, a Georgia-based company.¹² Officials said Ramos had no criminal history and passed a background check with no problems.¹³

Charges and Accountability After His Death

Because Ramos was killed at the scene, there was no criminal case against him. The criminal accountability that followed targeted officers who responded that day. In June 2024, a Uvalde County grand jury indicted two former school district police officers.

Pete Arredondo was charged with 10 counts of child endangerment. The indictment accused him of placing 10 surviving children in “imminent danger” by directing officers in ways that delayed the response, failing to identify the situation as an active shooting, failing to establish a command center, and failing to provide keys or breaching tools in a timely manner.¹⁴ Arredondo pleaded not guilty, maintaining he had followed his training and was not the incident commander. A judge denied his motion to dismiss in December 2024.¹⁵ His trial has been tentatively set for 2027, with a change of venue expected.¹⁶

Adrian Gonzales, another former school district officer, was indicted on 29 counts of abandoning and endangering a child for allegedly failing to confront the shooter despite hearing gunshots from the hallway.¹⁷ His trial was moved to Corpus Christi and held in January 2026. After nearly three weeks of testimony and more than seven hours of deliberation, the jury acquitted him of all 29 counts.¹⁸ The Uvalde County District Attorney’s office has said it does not plan additional indictments related to the law enforcement response.

No federal or state officer who fired on Ramos has faced charges. The DOJ report noted that “almost all of the officials in charge that day have already been fired or have retired.”⁶ Civil lawsuits by victims’ families against Texas DPS officers, the school district, gun manufacturer Daniel Defense, Meta, and Activision remain pending in various courts, and in April 2025 the Uvalde City Council approved a $2 million settlement with families, funded through the city’s insurance.¹⁹

1
Spectrum News. The Timeline of How the School Shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Unfolded, According to a Federal Report
2
Texas Tribune. Law Enforcement Failure Uvalde Shooting Investigation
3
Wall Street Journal. Border Patrol Agents Who Killed Texas School Shooter Were From Agencys Elite Team
4
CNN. Texas House Uvalde Shooting Report
5
Texas Tribune. House Uvalde Investigation Takeaways
6
New York Times. Uvalde School Shooting Report DOJ
7
ABC News. Timeline: How the Shooting at a Texas Elementary School Unfolded
8
Texas Tribune. Uvalde School Shooting Victims
9
NBC DFW. Uvalde Survivors: Noah’s Journey Toward Healing
10
PBS NewsHour. Uvalde School Shooter Left Trail of Warning Signs Ahead of Attack
11
ABC News. Uvalde Shooter Exhibited Warning Signs
12
Texas Tribune. Uvalde Shooter Bought Gun Legally
13
CNN. Uvalde Texas School Shooting Salvador Ramos
14
Texas Tribune. Texas Uvalde Shooting Arredondo Indicted
15
PBS NewsHour. Judge Refuses to Drop Criminal Charges Against Former Uvalde Schools Police Chief
16
ABC News. Former Uvalde School Police Chief Set for Court
17
CNN. Uvalde School Shooting Police Indictments
18
ABC News. Uvalde Trial Verdict Reached in Case of Former School Police Officer
19
CBS News. Uvalde Approves $2 Million Settlement for Victims Families