Eva Mireles’s husband was an officer with the school district’s Police Department. But he was not allowed to enter the place where his wife and her students were under attack.
In the final moments of her life, Eva Mireles, a teacher at Robb Elementary School, was on the phone with her husband, Ruben Ruiz, a school district police officer, the senior county official said on Wednesday. They spoke for the last time from opposite sides of the school walls: She was with her fourth-grade students in a pair of adjoining classrooms taken over by a gunman; he was outside the school, amid the fast-growing throng of armed officers who rushed to the scene.
“She’s in the classroom and he’s outside. It’s terrifying,” the Uvalde County judge, Bill Mitchell, said on Wednesday after being briefed by sheriff’s deputies who were at the shooting that left 19 students and two teachers dead. The call was among several new details that have added to — and, in some cases, significantly altered — the shifting portrait of the shooting in Uvalde that has been offered by top officials, including Gov. Greg Abbott and the head of the state police, Steven McCraw. The gunman’s grandmother, whom he shot in the face at home minutes before bursting into the school, had been employed at the elementary school in years past, a top teachers’ union official said. The two officers who first approached the classrooms and were struck by bullets that were fired through the locked door were senior members of the Uvalde Police Department, a lieutenant and a sergeant, officials said. And a door to the school, through which the gunman, Salvador Ramos, entered, had been closed, but not locked as it should have been — a crucial amendment to the official narrative outlined to reporters, grieving Uvalde families and viewers of broadcasts carried live around the nation from the usually quiet ranching city about 80 miles west of San Antonio. The latest detail about the teacher’s phone call to her husband is potentially an important one — suggesting that at least one of the officers arriving at the scene had information from inside the classrooms that could have informed the decision by the police to delay entry. A question remained as to whether 911 calls from children inside the classrooms, starting 30 minutes after the gunman arrived, were communicated to the commander at the scene. Several times since last week, information presented by officials as fact in news conferences has later been changed or entirely retracted, further rattling an already stricken community and undermining the faith of many Texans in the official narrative of what happened, even among law enforcement officials and those who represent them.
