Video Of Berkeley Officer Involved Shooting Released

BERKELEY, CA — Berkeley police released more details and video footage Tuesday of a man being shot and wounded by an officer last month after a tense standoff at the man's home.

On April 13, just before 7 a.m., a neighbor called 911 to report what sounded like a man attacking a woman inside their home in the 1900 block of McGee Avenue.

The caller told a dispatcher he heard a woman screaming that she's sorry and that she couldn't breathe.

"I think the dude's like beating his girlfriend," the caller said.

When officers got to the home, they said they tried for seven minutes to contact the people inside before preparing to force the door open. That's when 33-year-old Ricardo Ruiz started to demand that the officers leave and repeatedly threatened to shoot them.

At one point, while officers were working to disable external security cameras Ruiz was using to watch them, they heard what they thought sounded like someone racking a round into the chamber of a shotgun.

Then, about 25 minutes into the encounter, Ruiz allegedly opened the home's metal security door and pointed what turned out to be an air pistol at officers.

After a SWAT team negotiator failed to convince him to surrender peacefully, Ruiz then allegedly opened the door again, yelled "back up" while pointing the pistol at officers and was shot by an officer taking cover behind a dumpster.

Investigators later discovered a mark on the dumpster that appears to have been made by a round from the air gun.

A woman then came out of the home and knelt by Ruiz, who had fallen to the ground with what appears to be a head wound and was bleeding profusely. While a pair of officers provided first aid, the woman can be heard in the video yelling at other officers to "get out of our house," "are you kidnapping me" and "you're hurting me."

The video, which has been edited by police and includes a written narration of events, uses body camera footage but doesn't include footage from the officer who shot Ruiz. That officer's camera "inadvertently deactivated" before the shooting, according to a news release from Berkeley police.

Ruiz was taken to a hospital and was treated and released to Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, where he is being held without bail on suspicion of assault on a peace officer, exhibiting a firearm in the presence of an officer and unlawful firearm activity.

He is scheduled to appear at the Wiley W. Manuel Courthouse in Oakland for a bail hearing on Friday.

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