Online Instagram threats by Uvalde shooter went unreported, dismissed as harmless ‘kids joke around like that’
- The Washington Post reported gunman who killed 21 at a Texas school often threatened people online, but his comments were not reported to parents or authorities
- Online Users who interacted with the 18-year-old shooter say he would post images of dead cats and joke about sexual assault in addition to making threats
The gunman who killed 21 during a shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday frequently threatened people he spoke to online, but the threats were never reported to parents or authorities, The Washington Post reported.
Users who interacted with the 18-year-old shooter on the social networking apps Yubo and Instagram say he would post images of dead cats and joke about sexual assault in addition to making threats.
“I witnessed him harass girls and threaten them with sexual assault, like rape and kidnapping,” a 16-year old Yubo user who interacted with the shooter told The Washington Post. “It was not like a single occurrence. It was frequent.”
One researcher suggested that threats sent to girls and women, who are frequently harassed online, wouldn’t cause unusual alarm because it is such a common occurrence.
“When someone says something violent to you or makes some sort of death threat to you, for many women that happens so often that it wouldn’t even register with them,” Whitney Phillips, a researcher and new faculty member of the University of Oregon told The Washington Post.
At least one girl who interacted with the gunman online said he had told another Yubo user “shut up before I shoot you,” but she told The Washington Post she brushed it off because “kids joke around like that.”
Harrowing accounts are emerging of the ordeal faced by survivors of the Tuesday attack.
Texas authorities admitted on Friday that as many as 19 police officers were in the school hallway for nearly an hour without breaching the room where the shooter was, thinking he had ended his killing. Officials called this delay the “wrong decision.”
The shooter, Salvador Ramos was finally killed by police.
US President Joe Biden will visit Uvalde on Sunday to console residents in the small Texas town, as he calls for action to prevent future massacres in a country where efforts to tighten firearms regulations have repeatedly failed.
“We cannot outlaw tragedy, I know, but we can make America safer. We can finally do what we have to do to protect the lives of the people and of our children,” Biden said on Saturday in a speech at the University of Delaware.
“So I call on all Americans this hour to join hands and make your voices heard and work together to make this nation what it can and should be,” the president said.
Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse
