Eva Mireles’ police officer husband, Ruben Ruiz, had his gun seized before he was detained and escorted off the scene at the Robb Elementary School after his wife phoned him and pled for help because she was dying from her gunshot injury.
The disturbing new information was revealed by Texas Department of Public Safety Director Col. Steven McGraw while giving testimony during the Texas Senate hearing on Tuesday. He recalled how Eva, who worked as a fourth-grade teacher at the school, had called her husband shortly after police responded to the Uvalde school shooting but he had been prohibited from helping his significant other. In a video shared by PBS News Hour, Steven recalled, “We got an officer, Officer Ruiz, whose wife had called him and said she (had) been shot and she’s dying.”
Officer Ruiz attempted to save his wife, Eva Mireles. She called saying she’d been shot and was dying. They took his gun and escorted him off the property.
Uvalde police department needs to be held accountable for at a minimum, reckless endangerment in the first degree.
— ResistaSista (@Anonymousditto) June 22, 2022
“What happened to him as 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.” Eva was one of the two educators who were killed in the deadly shooting on May 24, when 18-year-old Salvador Ramos entered the school premises and fired countless bullets inside a classroom. 19 students were killed in the attack.
Eva’s aunt, Lydia Martinez Delgado, told the New York Times that her niece died while trying to protect her adolescent students. Eva and Ruben’s daughter, Adalynn Ruiz, weighed in on the heartbreaking ordeal as she paid tribute to her mother following her death last month.
“Mom, you are a hero. I keep telling myself that this isn’t real,” she penned in a Facebook post. “I just want to hear your voice. I want everything back. I want you to come back to me mom. I miss you more than words can explain.”
Her cousin, Amber Ybarra, had also shared some endearing words after coming to terms with the loss of their family member, telling TODAY, “No one walked into that school yesterday knowing that anything like this was possible. What she did at the school, and she put her heart in everything that she did.”
Since the shooting, there’s been a heap of backlash from not just Uvalde locals but also police officers, who agree that there was a lack of leadership and misinformation presented to them when they arrived at the school but hesitated to take action and seize the shooter.
The gunman was said to have been inside the Robb Elementary School for between 40 minutes to an hour, officials admitted, during which time a group of cops had assembled outside, waiting for confirmation to enter the building.
In a statement by Steven, he testified that the police response was an “abject failure,” which could have possibly prevented the deaths of so many casualties had there not been so much hesitating to take on the shooter.
“What officers were being told was, ‘The subject is contained, the chief is in the classroom or the office, negotiating or talking to the subject. So everyone is treating it, that comes in afterwards, you’re in the hallway and you’re looking at it, and you’re being told this, there’s no reason to discount that,” he stressed. “Now, certainly if you heard, ‘Well, wait a minute, we’re getting 911 calls from children in the classroom.’ And we didn’t know the timeline.”