HOUSTON — A gunman killed 19 people, including 18 children, in a shooting Tuesday at an elementary school in a predominantly Latino Texas town.

“He shot and killed — horrifically, incomprehensibly,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said.

Abbott said at a news conference that the shooter — whom he identified as Salvador Ramos, 18 — had a handgun and possibly a rifle Tuesday morning when he entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, a city of about 16,000 people approximately 85 miles west of San Antonio.

Police officers are believed to have killed the gunman, who had been a student at a nearby high school, Abbott said.

Pete Arredondo, police chief of the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, said Tuesday afternoon that investigators believed that “the suspect did act alone during this heinous crime.”

Ramos shot and wounded his grandmother before he arrived at the elementary school, according to a law enforcement source.

Clad in all black, Ramos was captured on a security camera approaching the school carrying at least one visible weapon. Investigators searched a black SUV that the gunman abandoned near the school moments before the shooting and federal and local law enforcement are conducting searches at his home and other addresses associated with his family.

The incident is the deadliest mass shooting at a U.S. elementary school since a gunman killed 20 children and six adults in the 2012 Sandy Hook school attack in Newtown, Connecticut.

“Everybody’s heartbroken and stunned,” said Uvalde County Commissioner John Yeackle. “It’s a small town, so no one is going to be unaffected. There won’t be anybody that doesn’t know — either directly or indirectly — either family or friends that are going to be affected by this.”

At least two officers were struck by the shooter’s gunfire and one has a wound, according to a law enforcement source.

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