He could be cryptic, demeaning and scary, sending angry messages and photos of guns. If they didn’t respond how he wanted, he sometimes threatened to rape or kidnap them — then laughed it off as some big joke.

But the girls and young women who talked with Salvador Ramos online in the months before he allegedly killed 19 children in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, rarely reported him. His threats seemed too vague. One teen who reported Ramos on the social app Yubo said nothing happened as a result.

Stephen Garcia learned Tuesday that his best friend from middle and early high school had shot and killed at least 19 children at their childhood elementary. But in another sense, it wasn’t the person he had known who did it.

“I lost my friend a long time ago,” said Garcia, 18.

Garcia, a senior in high school, grew up in Uvalde, Tex. Salvador Ramos was a classmate of his but they didn’t become best friends until around eighth grade.