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You may have seen this image pulled from the Uvalde surveillance video circulating on Twitter. For many, it was the ultimate image of dereliction of duty, an officer stopping to check his phone instead of rushing to confront the shooter.

Lots of people on Twitter were angry about it.

At one point, defund the police was trending because people were using the Uvalde video to call for it. The top tweet has more than 300k likes.

There are hundreds if not thousands more like this but you get the idea. Lots of people dunking on this cop in particular. But there was more to the story. This officer has been identified as Ruben Ruiz. His wife Eva Mireles was a teacher at the school. Here’s the timeline of what happened in the full video released this week:

  • The shooter enters the school at 11:33.
  • Police enter the school about 11:36:00 and move down the hall toward the shooter.
  • Ruiz is seen entering about 11:36:17, just seconds later.
  • Ruiz checks his phone at 11:36:50.
  • Shots fired by the gunman drive the officers back down the hall at 11:36:59.
  • Ruiz checks his phone again at 11:37:17. He turns and walks out.
  • At 11:37:41, he returns and says “My wife’s shot” to the cops in the hallway.

According to the Texas Tribune, Ruiz’s wife told him in a phone call that she’d been shot. That call must have happened after he walked out.

Mireles told Ruiz in a phone call that she had been shot. Ruiz, standing in the hallway with his pistol drawn, was unable to get to her.

In any case, it’s clear the reason he was checking his phone is that he was receiving messages from his wife as this was happening. After telling other officers she’d been shot he paced around for a few months and then left the hallway again. According to a report last month from the Houston Chronicle, Ruiz tried to advance but had his gun taken away:

“We’ve got an officer, Officer Ruiz, whose wife called him and said she had been shot and she was dying,” McCraw said. “And what happened to him, is 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 Mireles was still alive when the gunman was finally killed more than an hour later but unfortunately she died on the way to the hospital.

Like everyone who has seen this clip, I’m angry at the police officers who retreated at the fist sign of fire from the gunman. They then stood around discussing what to do for more than an hour. Personally I think every one of these officers ought to be fired. They were trained to stack up, go in and neutralize the shooter ASAP. None of them did that until 75 minutes later.

However, officer Ruiz has been treated unfairly based on one image taken out of context. He wasn’t just standing around checking his phone. He was checking on his wife’s safety and was clearly eager to see something done quickly. Unfortunately, he didn’t feel empowered to act on his own while all the other officers on hand decided to set up a useless barricade that dragged on for over an hour. When he allegedly did try to get to her the other officers stopped him and disarmed him.

Here’s the full video so you can see it for yourself. I have the cued up to the moment officer Ruiz checks his phone the first time. Does Ruiz ever return after walking out the 2nd time? I don’t think so.

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