Uvalde teacher’s spouse leaves district police
Ruben Ruiz, the husband of Eva Mireles, a teacher who died May 24 in the Robb Elementary School massacre, has resigned from the Uvalde school district police department, officials confirmed.
Mireles was one of two teachers who, along with 19 children, were shot and killed at the school, and Ruiz was one of hundreds of officers who responded — and one of the few who tried to get the others to move faster against the gunman.
The district could not say when his resignation took effect. Ruiz did not respond to an interview request Monday.
While standing in the hallway of the school, he received a phone call from his wife, who was inside one of the classrooms with the shooter.
“Dude, he’s in my wife’s classroom,” body camera footage shows Ruiz saying to other officers after exiting the building.
He went back inside with his gun drawn. “She says she’s been shot,” he said. Another
officer gently guided him back outside.
Mireles died on the way to the hospital. An educator for 17 years, she loved hiking, Crossfit and her dogs. She and Ruiz had a daughter, Adalynn “Addy” Ruiz, now 23.
Early on, when a photo of Ruiz looking at his phone in the hallway at Robb was published in the New York Post from newly released body camera images, he was depicted as part of the botched law enforcement response that failed to confront the gunman for more than an hour — an anonymous example of casual disarray.
Ruiz was widely criticized online because of that photo, but state Rep. Joe Moody, D-EL Paso, one of three lawmakers working on the House committee that investigated the disastrous police response, spoke out on Twitter to defend him.
Ruiz has kept a low profile but has appeared with other families of the victims at events commemorating their loss.
“He was in a tough situation. I’m not sure what is the consensus in town. I’m sure many people have a lot of questions. But I can only imagine the choices he was faced with that day and the choices he has to live with every single day. I pray that he is OK,” said Jesse Rizo, the uncle of one of the shooting victims, Jacklyn Cazares, 10.
“It’s honorable that he resigned and he is no longer in the force,” Rizo added. “I think that is the honorable thing to do and hope that more officers follow suit.”
Since October, many central office staff at Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District have resigned, and its police department was suspended and assigned to other duties pending an investigation into officers’ performance that day.