It did not go without notice when an 18-year-old who frequently sparred with classmates before dropping out of high school posted a picture of two long, black rifles on his Instagram story.

The image was startling enough that a freshman at Uvalde High School sent it to his older cousin on Saturday morning and asked who would have let the former student obtain the weapons.

“He finna shoot something up,” replied the older cousin, Jeremiah Munoz, who had graduated from the high school and knew the former student. The freshman noted that the week ahead was the last of the school year and said, in words that would become chillingly prescient: “I’m scared now to go to school.” He added a skull emoji.

The exchange adds to the wealth of evidence that Salvador Ramos, 18, had begun to tease his plans — sometimes in oblique and sometimes in more explicit ways — in the days and weeks before he fatally shot 19 children and two teachers in a classroom on Tuesday.

The freshman was far from the only person who harboured fears that he might turn the weapons on students in the district. A 15-year-old girl in Germany had video chatted with Ramos as he visited a gun store, unpacked a box of ammunition that he had ordered online and showed off a black duffel bag holding magazines and a rifle.

One of his co-workers at the Wendy’s fast food outlet in Uvalde said the 18-year-old frequently snapped at other employees and customers, and that they took to calling him names including “school shooter” in part because of his long hair and dark garb. A California woman he had met online said she had been afraid when he tagged her in a picture of his guns out of the blue, telling him “it’s just scary.”

The exchanges raise questions about whether teenagers who knew the 18-year-old should have reported the concerns to their parents.

New York Times News Service