A woman who has long claimed she is the girlfriend of the deceased Robb Elementary school shooter has been jailed in Puerto Rico and now faces a bevy of federal charges alleging she threatened to kill officials, citizens, teachers and facilities in Uvalde, Texas, for years and as recently as last month.
Flowers and candles are placed around crosses on May 28, 2022, at a memorial outside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, to honor the victims killed in the school shooting. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong, File)
Victoria Gabriela Rodriguez-Morales, 19, was arrested on Wednesday in Puerto Rico after being indicted by a grand jury on 13 counts for making interstate threats.
According to an FBI affidavit obtained by Law&Crime Thursday, Morales-Rodriguez was under investigation for similar conduct in 2018 when she and her family still lived in Uvalde.
“She sent threats to kill people, to kill public officials, shoot schools and kill teachers and students” in 2018, court records show, and she “admitted to the conduct” then.
Already on juvenile supervision, Morales-Rodriguez and her family relocated from Texas to Puerto Rico in 2020, but despite there being more than 2,000 miles separating her from Uvalde, prosecutors say she couldn’t give up her heinous habits.
The pattern continued from 2020 through 2023, the indictment alleges, and the FBI agent investigating the case said Rodriguez-Morales would even use her own mother’s cell phone to repeatedly call and threaten the Uvalde Police, people and staff at Uvalde High School, including the school’s human resources department specifically, the Morales Junior High School, members of the Texas Public Safety Department, the Texas Rangers for Uvalde, and the Uvalde Fire Department. Vulgar emails were also sent.
When a school shooter opened fired May 24, 2022 on Robb Elementary in Uvalde, 19 students were killed along with two teachers. Many were also injured.
In the wake of the massacre, the FBI began tracing threatening calls received by Uvalde school officials and others. They traced them back to Puerto Rico. The FBI alleges it was a juvenile Morales-Rodriguez making the calls at the time. When she turned 18 in August 2022, the harassing messages kept up.
They did not stop in 2023, either.
In April 2023, for example, she messaged a staff member at the Uvalde Leader News vowing there were more attacks to come; a month later on social media she left comments on news pages tagging police officials and discussing how she and the Robb Elementary school shooter were supposed to “commit that massacre together.”
In one post on Instagram this spring, police say Morales-Rodriguez used the handle “pilon_gaby” to taunt and threaten the former police commissioner of Uvalde at the time of the massacre, Peter Arrendondo. In one message she claimed to have told him the shooting was imminent but he ignored her.
She also left comments under public posts on Instagram created by the City of Uvalde. Under one from the city, the FBI says Morales-Rodriguez left an utterly callous remark stating that the children who perished at the school that day deserved to die.
“I’m glad tho that my ex could accomplish something we both wanted to do [heart eyes emoji]. Its lovely but the fact that more blood is going be drained through my hands, it makes me horny,” user “pilon_gaby” wrote on May 21, 2023, just days before the first anniversary of the massacre (spelling and punctuation in original).
Morales-Rodriguez threatened others this June, vowing that any “new school in construction” in a gradually rebuilding Uvalde would be “blowed up by C4.”
Students at Morales Junior High School and at Uvalde High School also appeared to receive threats including messages that vowed to kill incoming freshmen.
“I will haunt everyone from class 2022 to 2023 each and every single one of y’all will die in the name of Salvador, I have a whole crew waiting for my signal to start the plan we have,” she said. The “Salvador” in the message is likely a reference to Salvador Ramos, the 18-year-old who attacked the school. He was killed by police.
Notably, it was only weeks after she allegedly sent these messages that the cousin of the Robb Elementary School shooter was arrested. His family had tipped off police that he tried to buy a gun and “do the same thing” at a local school.
Then, this October, the FBI says it found comments Morales-Rodriguez left all over the game streaming site Kick vowing to attack Uvalde High School as well as Texas A&M. And roughly a week before a mayoral election this November in Texas where candidate Kmberly Mata-Rubio was running, mother of Robb Elementary student Lexi Mata-Rubio, the FBI says it was Morales-Rodriguez who sent an email to the Uvalde school district promising: “If Mata Rubio wins the elections I will kill her.”
Prosecutors allege the young woman used a number of email accounts or handles to traffic her threats. That included email addresses such as “schoolshooter893@gmail.”
A Texas news outlet, KSAT, reported this week that when she was undergoing juvenile legal proceedings in Texas years ago, the young woman was diagnosed with “opposition defiant disorder and intermittent explosive disorder.”
Morales-Rodriguez also displayed “above average intelligence with lack of remorse or guilt,” experts found.
For now, authorities want to keep Morales-Rodriguez detained pending trial because they consider her a flight risk.
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