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UVALDE, Texas — Eva Mireles, one of two teachers murdered at Robb Elementary School along with 19 students, was on the phone with her husband, Ruben Ruiz, a school district police officer, during the final moments of her life, the senior county official said on Wednesday.
The couple communicated for the last time from opposite sides of the school walls. Mireles was with her fourth-grade students in a pair of adjoining classrooms taken over by the 18-year-old gunman. Ruiz was outside the school, amid the fast-growing throng of law enforcement personnel who rushed to the scene, the New York Times reported.
“She’s in the classroom and he’s outside. It’s terrifying,” Uvalde County Judge Bill Mitchell said on Wednesday after he was briefed by sheriff’s deputies who were at the mass murder.
Judge Mitchell is the county’s top executive official.
The latest detail about the teacher’s phone call to her husband may prove important as the investigation continues since at least one law enforcement officer was privy to information from inside the targeted classroom.
Mireles, a teacher of 17 years, was shot and killed trying to protect her students, according to her aunt Lydia Martinez Delgado.
Her husband who had rushed to the scene, was reportedly prevented by superiors from going inside. “He could not go into the classroom where all the shooting victims were at,” Martinez Delgado said in an interview last week, the Times reported.
Ruiz understandably declined a media request for an interview.
It was unclear when the married couple spoke or for how long.
“I don’t know what was said,” Mitchell said, though the gist of it appeared to be, he said, that the gunman was already on the attack. “He’s outside hearing his wife: ‘I’m dying,’” he said, before cautioning that he did not know precisely what words were exchanged.
Mitchell was unaware if the school district officer told the chief of his six-member department, Pete Arredondo, about the call, the New York Times reported.
“He was talking to his wife. Whether that was conveyed to Arredondo or anyone else, I don’t know,” said the judge.
The Texas Department of Public Safety said it was Chief Arredondo’s decision to wait to send officers into the classrooms until specialized equipment and more highly trained officers could arrive. In hindsight, it was the “wrong decision,” DPS Col. Steven McCraw said on Friday.
A vast majority of the shooting inside the classrooms, which were joined in the middle, occurred just after the killer entered, at 11:33 a.m., McCraw said during Friday’s press conference. The gunman was killed at about 12:51 p.m.
In a matter of hours, the ruthless mass murder redefined life in the small Texas town. Uvalde was a place known for its trees, its honey and its surrounding hunting ranches. Yet all of that has changed.
“This is the single most devastating, disastrous event that ever has happened in Uvalde County,” Mitchell said. “But we will rise. We will survive.”
The superintendent of Uvalde schools said on Wednesday that students and teachers would not be returning to the elementary school in the fall, the Times reported.
Gov. Greg Abbott directed the state to begin a review of security at all Texas schools before the coming academic year.
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