translated from Spanish: The family aftermath that marked the boy who shot in Coahuila

Joseph Angel barely knew his mother. Yezmín died in June 2014, when the boy was 6.
Nor did she know her maternal grandmother, Ana Isabel Llanes. She was murdered in July 2010, when José Angel was 2 years old.
He practically didn’t know his father. In June 2016, weeks after Jose Angel turned 8, his father of the same name was arrested for drug trafficking in the United States and spent three and a half years in jail.
José Angel lived this loneliness in the house of his paternal grandparents, from where he came out on January 10 with two pistols that he fired at teachers and students from his school, the Colegio Cervantes de Torreón, where he was in sixth grade. He killed a teacher and wounded six people before committing suicide.
Read: Weapons used by a student of the Cervantes College were from his grandfather and did not have permits: Prosecutor’s Office
Since this tragedy occurred a week ago, in La Laguna and in the country we have sought answers, while a panorama of criminal activities arises, suspected or already established, in its immediate family environment, which leaves us increasingly perplexed.
The lack of protection of the weapons owned by the grandfather, in whose house the child lived, led to his arrest. Then, accusations of deposits exceeding 100 million pesos in the accounts of grandparents, whose visible business was party halls, led authorities to report money laundering and tax fraud.
Details about the child’s parents’ past complicate the story. It is easy to fall into the temptation that this panorama explains the actions of little José Angel, but actually opens up more questions. No element of this story satisfies an explanation, because not all children who grow up in this environment shoot at their school.
But family backgrounds form a hypothesis, revealing a chronology that began before José Angel was born and whose aftermath marked his life in an unsuspected way. The following timeline is based on news records, court records and sources close to the shooting investigation. Direct surnames are omitted to protect the child’s identity.
The first public record dates from April 3, 2003, when Ana Isabel Llanes was arrested in the city of Gómez Palacio, neighboring Torreón, in an operation to capture Arturo Hernández, aka El Chaky, then head of the Juarez cartel in the Lagunera region. Ana Isabel had a romantic relationship with Hernandez, but in 2005 she was released for lack of evidence. (Hernández was released in 2013 before serving his full sentence of 20 years in prison). 
Read more: Urgent to address violence against children: NGOs and Child Protection System, after attack in Torreón
A few years later, Yezmin, daughter of Ana Isabel, began a relationship with a young twentysomething of Torreón named José Angel. In April 2008, they had a son, little José Angel. Two years later, on July 3, 2010, Ana Isabel was killed by several bullets and her body dumped in the Raymundo Park of Ciudad Lerdo, on the bed of the Nazas River that runs through La Laguna.  
It is not clear whether José Angel and Yezmin lived together, for there is no indication that they had been married. He had married another woman in 2006 and it is not known until now what his marital status was when his son was born.
On April 30, 2014, Yezmín made the last post on his Facebook page, about his son’s birthday party. Two months later, on June 28, he underwent surgery, but died of complications caused by diabetes.
The little José Angel, then six years old, went on to live in the house of his paternal grandparents, José Angel and Rebeca, located in the central area of Torreón, near the Cervantes School where he would study the primary. 
José Angel Sr. was not a constant presence and spent seasons outside the city. On May 23, 2016, he traveled to the United States. He crossed the Bridge of Laredo, Texas and headed for Dallas. Three days later, according to a court file in oklahoma city federal court, the Oklahoma City Drug Enforcement Agency learned from an informant of a shipment of methamphetamines that would be delivered to that city. The clue included a phone number. It was Joseph Angel’s.
On June 1, officers detected movement north of that phone, which they were located. Jose Angel and another man were traveling in a Cherokee van with Durango plates. They arrived in Oklahoma City and from a trailer picked up a black suitcase. DeA agents stopped them and in the suitcase they found 25 kilograms of methamphetamines, which they were going to deliver to a house where a woman would give her $70,000 in cash.
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On June 2, all three involved were filed in an Oklahoma federal court. José Angel pleaded guilty and was given pre-trial detention. On July 7, 2017, he was sentenced to four years in prison and sent to the federal low-security prison in Big Spring, West Texas.
While this was happening, the little boy studied at the Cervantes, but also began a dive into dark worlds. Online, he learned details of the 1999 Columbine school massacre, nine years before he was born, the tragedy that ushered in the modern era of U.S. school shootings. He took one of its authors, Eric Harris, diagnosed as a narcissistic psychopath, as a model. He began collecting toy weapons and air rifles. If someone was monitoring their digital activity, the signals passed by. 
It is not known whether Cervantes College was aware of the child’s situation, particularly the fact that his father had been in jail since José Angel was in third grade, and whether he received any form of psychological care.
Through his grandfather José Angel he knew the weapons of heavy caliber. The livelihood in that house seemed to come from the party hall and banquet service business. The Ministry of Finance ensures that this business was the front of a money laundering.
Meanwhile, José Angel Sr. purged two years and three months of his conviction and on October 28 last year he was released and deported to Mexico. He returned to Torreón and reunited with his son after more than three years of absence. He seemed to rejoin the little boy’s life.
Read: Natural Selection, the video game they link to shooting in Coahuila
It wouldn’t last long. They spent the Christmas and New Year’s Eve holidays together, but two days after returning to school, little Joseph Angel took two pistols from his grandfather and put them in his backpack along with black pants, suspenders and a T-shirt with the legend “Natural Selection”, the same outfit that Eric Harris wore in Columbine.
It is easy to think that, with this past in his short life, little José Angel had reason to escape it in a shootout. But the answers are not yet complete. There is always an unknown factor that provokes violent action. It will take time to form the full picture you can at least begin to explain why, minutes after the day’s courses started, you started shooting.
 
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Original source in Spanish