‘She said she’s shot, Johnny’: Harrowing body camera footage shows moment stricken Uvalde cop is held back by colleagues while trying to enter classroom and confront gunman after teacher wife was shot dead
- Uvalde school district officer Ruben Ruiz, 43, tried to move in on the shooter after getting a call from his wounded wife, teacher Eva Mireles, 44
- Mireles told him that she had been shot and was dying in a classroom at Robb Elementary School
- Video shows Ruiz, gun drawn, as he side-steps other officers standing around in the school hallway
- A fellow officer puts his arm around Ruiz’s shoulder and pulls him away from the scene
- Other law enforcement escorted him away from the school and took his gun away
- Ruiz was criticized after he was seen on video checking his phone before it was revealed that his wife had called during the standoff
Newly released body camera footage shows a Uvalde cop, gun in hand, being held back by other officers as he tries to storm the classroom where his schoolteacher wife lay wounded and dying.
The infuriating footage shows Uvalde school police officer Ruben Ruiz, 43, moving through a crowd of uniformed officers – all armed to the teeth – on his way to save his wife, Eva Mireles, a special education teacher who was killed in the mass shooting.
‘Hey, hey, hey, Ruben, Ruben, Ruben, Ruben,’ someone offscreen says as they see him moving past the line of officers.
The couple had been married for decades when she was gunned down by crazed gunman Salvador Ramos, 18, on May 24 in the classroom where she taught special education students.
Uvalde school officer Ruben Ruiz, 43, center, tried to take action to save his wounded school teacher wife, Eva Mireles, 44
Another officer grabs him by the shoulder and neck and pulls him away, as other stand around waiting for the command to confront the shooter
Ruiz, who had undergone active shooter drills months before, was escorted from the scene and disarmed
Law enforcement personnel waited for 78 minutes before storming the classroom and killing Salvator Ramos, 18
‘She says she’s shot, Johnny,’ Ruiz says to an officer, who puts his arm around the concerned husband’s neck and shoulder and pulls him back away from the direction of the classroom.
Off-camera, fellow officers then took his gun away from him.
Ruiz had been criticized before after surveillance video inside the school during the incident showed him checking his phone.
Fourth grade teacher Eva Mireles, 44, was gunned down at Robb Elementary School. She was an avid hiker, runner and sometimes biker
Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Officer Ruben Ruiz, 43, the husband of slain teacher Eva Mireles, 44, trained in active shooter drills in March
The cop husband of teacher Eva Mireles who was murdered in the Uvalde school shooting tried to rush in and save her after she called to tell him she had been shot but was stopped by colleagues who took away his gun
It was later revealed that Mireles had called Ruiz from inside the classroom, where she lay mortally wounded.
In the video, he’s standing down the hall from the classroom where the shooter was barricaded with his wife, checking his phone at 11:36am.
“She’s in the classroom and he’s outside. It’s terrifying,” the Uvalde County judge, Bill Mitchell told The New York Times.
‘I don’t know what was said,’ he told the paper. ‘He was talking to his wife.’
McCraw laid blame on the botched response on district police chief Pete Arredondo, who reportedly commanded cops on the scene to stay put and not confront gunman Salvadaor Ramos after the teen barricaded himself inside a filled fourth-grade classroom at Robb Elementary
Speaking at a State Senate hearing Tuesday, Texas Department of Public Safety head Steve McCraw slammed police’s response to the May 24 massacre as ‘an abject failure’ and that school district police ‘decided to place the lives of officers before the lives of children’
The timestamp in the recently released body camera footage shows it was 11:48 a.m. when he tried to take action against the gunman.
Texas Department of Public Safety director Steve McCraw had told of the episode during his damning portrayal of the police response to the Texas State Senate.
‘We got an officer whose wife called him and said she’d been shot and she’s dying. He tried to move forward into the hallway. He was detained, and they took his gun away from him and escorted him off the scene.’
Salvador Ramos, 18, was free to rampage through the school in Uvalde from 11:33am until 12:50pm. On Monday it emerged armed officers, with a ballistic shield, were inside the building at 11:52am
Mireles was one of 21 people killed, including 19 elementary school children, in what has been described as an ‘abject failure’ by law enforcement.
Despite being better armed and out- numbering the shooter, officers waited for 78 minutes before confronting Ramos and shooting him dead.
A review of the shooting response by the Texas House of Representatives recently concluded that several of the wounded may have survived if they had received medical treatment earlier.
It’s not clear which agency removed him from the scene.
Ruiz, a member of the Uvalde Consolidated School District Police, had recently undergone active shooter drills inside the school to prepare for just such an event.
In a shot eerily similar to the devastation at the elementary school, officers can be seen in Facebook photographs from the drill peering around a school hallway as several of the students lay on the floor in mock death.
‘Our overall goal is to train every Uvalde area law enforcement officer so that we can prepare as best as possible for any situation that may arise,’ the department posted above photos of the drills.
School district chief Pete Arrendondo, Ruiz’s boss, has received much of the blame for the delayed response in bringing down Ramos.
‘Three minutes after the subject entered the west hallway, there was sufficient number of armed officers wearing body armor, to isolate distract and neutralize the subject,’ McCraw told the committee while reviewing the timeline of the day’s tragic events.
In a scathing speech, McCraw said the district chief ‘decided to place the lives of officers before the lives of children.’
‘The only thing stopping a hallway of dedicated officers from entering room 111 and 112 was the on-scene commander, who decided to place the lives of officers before the lives of children,’ McCraw said.
‘The officers had weapons – the children had none. The officers had body armor – the children had none.’
‘The law enforcement response to the attack at Robb Elementary was an abject failure and antithetical to everything we’ve learned over the last two decades since the Columbine Massacre,’ McCraw declared.
Ruiz, who was born in Uvalde, became an officer in 2006 and worked as a patrolman, training officer, youth advisor detective, and worked in the Organized Crime Unit.
He trained in active shooter drills several times and attended Advanced SWAT school. He joined the school district police in 2018.
Mireles, who taught special education at Robb Elementary School for 17 years, was the mother of an adult daughter. She credited her longevity to the ‘supportive, fun and loving family, including her four pets.’
She enjoyed hiking, biking and running in the great outdoors.
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