Cop husband of slain Uvalde teacher held back

Heart-wrenching video has emerged of the Texas cop whose wife was among the 21 slaughtered in Uvalde being held back from rushing in to help after finding out his wife had been shot.

School cop Ruben Ruiz, 43, was one of the first to respond to Robb Elementary School — repeatedly alerting SWAT teams and officers in charge that the mass shooter was in his wife Eva Mireles’ classroom.

The new bodycam footage now shows how he tried to get through a throng of heavily armed fellow officers, who then dilly-dallied in the hallway for 77 minutes before finally confronting the crazed gunman, Salvador Ramos.

“Hey hey hey — Ruben, Ruben, Ruben, Ruben,” one officer says as the distressed school cop tries to push through the group with his gun in hand.

Ruiz pleads with them to let him through as an officer in a bulletproof police vest puts his hand on his shoulder to stop him.

“‘She says she’s shot, Johnny,” says Ruiz, who had been seen checking his phone as he received alarming updates from his wife.

Instead, another officer took hold of the distressed cop and turned him around to walk away from the flashpoint.

“He was detained, and they took his gun away from him and escorted him off the scene,” Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw previously noted in testimony decrying the “abject failure” of the response.

“He’s firing — he’s firing! I can hear it clearly. They’re in my wife’s classroom!”

Ruben Ruiz

Speaking to a special state Senate hearing, McCraw detailed how Ruiz immediately alerted others that he had “got a call from his wife” who was “in room 112 and later died.”

“He notes that she’s been shot — he’s talking about his wife,” McCraw said of the officer, who had recently held active-shooter drills at Ramos’ own high school.

Footage already released shows him at the school at 11:37 a.m., just minutes after Ramos, 18, had stormed in and started slaughtering 19 kids and two teachers.

“It’s my wife’s classroom,” he was heard telling the SWAT commander who ran away from the room after being shot at.

Another clip soon after caught him again pressing the urgency of storming in and stopping the second-deadliest school shooting in US history.

“He’s firing — he’s firing! I can hear it clearly. They’re in my wife’s classroom,” he said in other footage.

At least one of the kids in the blood-soaked classroom had begged for help saving Mireles, 44, during one of several 911 calls made during the slaughter, pleading, “Send help for my teacher, she is shot but still alive.”

However, Mireles later died alongside fellow teacher Irma Garcia and 19 of their students as police waited more than an hour to storm the adjoining classrooms.

Ruiz was prevented from acting at the same time as desperate parents outside the building clashed with cops preventing them from storming inside and trying to rescue their kids themselves.

The widely-condemned police response is the focus of numerous officials investigations.