Police officer husband of murdered Uvalde teacher was detained, disarmed and prevented from saving his wife

A police officer whose wife, a teacher at the Uvalde school, was murdered during the Robb Elementary school shooting tried to rush into the building to save her after she called to tell him that she'd been shot. The officer was stopped by colleagues from entering, however, who also took away his gun. Eve Mireles died from her wounds.

The story was told on Tuesday by Texas Department of Public Safety director Steve McCraw, who said that Ruben Ruiz, who worked as a Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District officer, wanted to rush into his wife's aid before being detained in a hallway by other officers, according to local news.

"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," said McCraw, though no specifications were made as to which agency stopped Ruiz from entering.

During Tuesday's press conference, McCraw blamed district police chief Pete Arredondo for much of the failure that took place in Uvalde, saying that it was Arredondo who told police to not confront gunman Salvador Ramos after the teen barricaded himself in the fourth-grade classroom.

McCraw called the police shooting's response an "abject failure," and said that police were on the scene within minutes of the gunman entering the building, but did not act for over an hour.

"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," he said.

"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."

McCraw also said yesterday that the classroom door that Ramos had put himself behind had not been locked, a new revelation that contradicts earlier reports from Arredondo's department that the chief had been trying to find the keys for the door for an hour.

Officers did not even try to open the door, and McCraw said that the doors "could not lock from the inside."

"One hour, 14 minutes and eight seconds," said McCraw. "That’s how long the children waited and the teachers waited...to be rescued."

"While they waited," McCraw said, "the on-scene commander waited for radios and rifles, waited for shields, and waited for SWAT.

"Lastly, he waited for a key that was never needed."