Lawmaker: Officer in Uvalde school video is spouse of slain teacher
UVALDE, Texas — A Uvalde police officer criticized over video of him checking his phone during the massacre at Robb Elementary School is the husband of a teacher who was killed in the classroom and had contacted him after being shot, according to a Texas lawmaker investigating the shooting.
Texas state Rep. Joe Moody came to the defense of Ruben Ruiz after the officer was singled out by some users on social media as an example of the bewildering inaction by law enforcement during the May 24 attack.
Roughly 80 minutes of surveillance video published this week by the Austin American-Statesman showed Ruiz as one of the first officers to arrive in the hallway after the shooting began. He checks his phone moments before officers closer to the classroom run back down the hallway after shots are fired.
Moody tweeted Wednesday that the officer was the husband of Eva Mireles, one of two teachers killed along with 19 children in the fourth-grade classrooms. Moody is part of a Texas House committee that has spent weeks investigating the shooting and plans to release its findings Sunday.
“I’d not planned to speak publicly until the report was released, but I couldn’t say nothing seeing this man, who’s lost everything, maligned as if he was indifferent or actively malicious. Context matters,” Moody tweeted.
The hallway video shows Ruiz quickly glancing at his phone around 11:36 a.m. while holding a position at the end of the hallway. Three minutes earlier, the gunman is seen walking down the hallway and entering the classroom.
Authorities have previously said that body camera footage later showed Ruiz at 11:48 a.m. entering the building through the west door and telling officers, “She is shot.”
“What happened to (Ruiz) is he tried to move forward into the hallway, he was detained and they took his gun away from him and they escorted him from the scene,” Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw told lawmakers at a hearing on June 21.
McCraw has called it an “abject failure” that police ultimately waited more than an hour before confronting the gunman.
Sri Lanka crisis: Protesters retreated from government buildings Thursday in Sri Lanka, restoring a tenuous calm to the economically crippled country, and the embattled president at last emailed the resignation that demonstrators have sought for months.
President Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled a day earlier under pressure from protesters enraged by the island nation’s economic collapse. He emailed his resignation a day later than promised, according to an official.
An aide to the speaker of the Sri Lankan Parliament issued a statement that said the speaker had received the president’s resignation through the Sri Lankan Embassy in Singapore, but there was no immediate official announcement.
An announcement was planned for Friday after the authenticity and legality of the letter are verified, the statement said.
Spacey pleads: Actor Kevin Spacey pleaded not guilty on Thursday to charges of sexually assaulting three men and a trial date was set for next
year.
Spacey, 62, replied “not guilty” to each of the five charges during a hearing at London’s Central Criminal Court. Judge Mark Wall set a date of June 6 for the trial to start and said it would last three to four weeks.
The former “House of Cards” star, who ran London’s Old Vic theater between 2004 and 2015, denied four counts of sexual assault and one count of causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent.
The incidents allegedly took place in London between March 2005 and August 2008, and one in western England in April 2013. The victims are now in their 30s and 40s.
SC attorney killings: Over 13 months after disgraced South Carolina attorney Alex Murdaugh called 911 after finding his wife and son shot outside their home, a grand jury indicted him Thursday on murder charges in their killings.
But the legal documents shed little light on the ongoing mystery over the deaths that captivated the public, who have clicked on hundreds of stories and podcasts detailing the dozens of other criminal charges that have piled up in the months since Murdaugh’s wife Maggie, 52, and their 22-year-old son, Paul, were killed on June 7, 2021.
Alex Murdaugh, 54, has repeatedly denied any role in the deaths.
Each murder indictment was one paragraph with one new detail, accusing Murdaugh of killing his wife with a rifle and his son with a shotgun.
Malcolm X case: New York’s criminal justice system took 55 years to acknowledge it wrongly branded Muhammad Aziz as one of Malcolm X’s killers. Now he and the city are at an impasse over how much it should pay for the two decades he spent imprisoned after his 1966 murder conviction.
Lawyers for Aziz, 84, filed
a civil rights lawsuit Thursday seeking $40 million from the city for its role in a verdict that was vacated last year after the Manhattan district attorney apologized in court for illegal conduct by the police and prosecutors who handled the case.
The complaint, filed in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, signaled the breakdown of settlement negotiations between the city comptroller and Aziz.
Aziz was convicted in 1966 of first-degree murder in the killing of Malcolm X, who was about to embark on a new phase of his career after a bitter break from the Nation of Islam.
In court papers, Aziz’s lawyers accused the New York Police Department and the Manhattan district attorney’s office of withholding evidence that supported his claim of innocence, using witness procedures that were suggestive and coercing witnesses to give false testimony. Twenty-four former officers are named in the complaint.
European wildfires: Over 3,000 firefighters battled Thursday alongside Portuguese citizens desperate to save their homes from wildfires that raged across the European country.
Central Portugal has been particularly hard hit by a spate of blazes this week. In the village of Bemposta, residents used garden hoses to spray their lawns and roofs in hopes they could save them from the flames.
Temperatures in the interior of the Atlantic country were forecast to hit 111 as hot, dry air blown in from Africa lingers over the western edge of the Iberian Peninsula. In June, 96% of Portugal was classified as being in either in extreme or severe drought.
Spain was still combating a fire started by a lightning strike on Monday in the west-central Las Hurdes area that has consumed about 8,600 acres. Temperatures in many parts of Spain have topped 104 for several days and are expected to stay high until next week.