Gangbanger to Gangbuster : Mona Ruiz Broke With Her Past and Friends While Overcoming Police Department Skeptics

Mona Ruiz carries the weight of two badges.

One, Santa Ana police shield No. 1725, she has worn proudly while arresting hundreds of gangbangers from the city’s toughest turfs. The other, a faded red tattoo that coils around the wrist of her shooting hand, marks her as a former gang member, a past predator on the same streets she now protects.

The two symbols clash, as do Ruiz’s troubled past and her exemplary present. “I lived in two separate worlds,” said the 34-year-old divorced mother of three. “Two different lives, one life on the gang side, and now a life on the other side of the fence.”

Getting over the fence was the hardest thing she has ever done. Becoming a police officer meant turning her back on much of her former life. To many childhood friends, even relatives, that made Ruiz a traitor and a threat.

Her welcome to the police station was not exactly a warm one, either. From the time Ruiz joined the department as a part-time clerk in 1975, her appearance and background made her a suspicious figure.

“I’ve had to prove myself over and over,” said Ruiz, now a four-year veteran street officer assigned to the department’s gang unit. “It’s never been easy. It’s always been a struggle to get where I wanted to go.”

Ruiz walks and speaks slowly and precisely. Her 5-foot, 3-inch frame may not cut an imposing figure, but she is wiry and street-smart, an accomplished kick boxer. Fellow officers grin when they talk about the times Ruiz has cowed hulking male suspects who doubted her strength.

“Believe me, she holds her own,” said Officer Dave Marshall, her partner.

One of eight children, Ruiz grew up among aunts, uncles and neighbors caught up in gangs and their violence. She remembers as a preschooler watching her parents help a wounded cousin who came banging at their door seeking refuge from the police.

She had seen a dozen people killed before she was old enough to drive, and half a dozen times as a teen-ager she cradled dying friends who been shot during street skirmishes. She saw others die from drug overdoses, their glazed and wild eyes dimming before closing forever.

“You don’t forget things like that,” she said quietly. “Ever.”

While Ruiz fought for her gang, and even married another member, she said she always distanced herself from the group’s hard-core activities.

“I got in a lot of fights because I wouldn’t do drugs,” Ruiz said. “I had seen too many girls get raped by guys, guys in the same gang, because they got too wasted. And the people I knew who did drugs--their lives just fell apart.”

Some friends laughed while others became wary when she got a clerical job at the Santa Ana Police Department through a high school jobs program. At the police station, authorities were equally wary.

“It was obvious that she was a gang member,” said Lt. Felix Osuna, now commander of the department’s traffic division. “She was a real concern to us. We wondered if we could trust her with reports; we wondered why she was working here, all sorts of things.”

Partly because of his suspicions, Osuna decided to get to know Ruiz and the two became unlikely friends. The veteran cop learned about the violence, drugs and desperation that surrounded Ruiz when she left work every night.

“She would tell my partner and I horror stories about what she had seen, shootings and stabbings and drive-bys,’ Osuna said. “And she would talk about wanting to get out of it.”

The two chatted almost daily during the next few years, with Osuna offering Ruiz advice, a small loan or a friendly ear--whichever she needed most. He said he worried about her, especially when she quit the department for four years during her marriage to an abusive gang member.

When the two saw each other during that period, Osuna would urge Ruiz to come back. He would tell her to get away from the gang scene, to think about her children.

Finally, in 1985, Ruiz made the break with her husband and the gang, returning to the station as part of the parking enforcement unit. For four years she was busy writing parking tickets and raising her children alone, but she knew she wanted more.

Although he knew her well, Osuna said he was floored in 1989 when Ruiz walked into his office and announced her new aspiration, an old dream. “I want to be a police officer,” she told him.

Osuna warned her that it would be a difficult road, and he was right. The department turned down her initial application, telling Ruiz she “was not Santa Ana material.”

“But what they meant was I didn’t look like a cop is supposed to look,” Ruiz said. Even now, she stands out among the department’s predominantly white male ranks. Among 380 officers, only 15 are women. Among the 15, only three are Latinas.

After the department refused to send Ruiz through its academy, she increased her resolve to prove herself. She went to a nighttime reserve academy while holding down her day job and raising her children.

“I would look at my kids sleeping at night and think about them being shot like all the kids I had seen get killed,” Ruiz said. “That helped me decide.”

Beaming with pride, Osuna pinned the silver badge on his protege’s lapel when Ruiz graduated from the Police Academy in December, 1989. The only woman in her class, she finished among the top five, graduating with honors.

“She did it, despite all the odds,” Osuna said. “She’s a survivor. How could you not respect her?”

It was no secret that more than a few people in the department hoped that background checks would provide grounds to deny her application. During her rookie months, she said, she was confronted by officers who accused her of being unworthy of the uniform, or suggested she was a spy. Others went further.

“I had one sergeant tell me: ‘You don’t belong here. If it takes the rest of my career, I’m going to make sure you don’t make it.’ ”

Ruiz, weary of the confrontations, says: “When I meet other cops, they see (the tattoo) and ask about it. Some get real tense about it. I had one tell me, ‘You look like you should be in the back of the patrol car, not the front.’ ”

Despite her associations, Ruiz said she never ended up in the back of a squad car during her teen-age years, an assertion that the department’s exhaustive investigations confirmed. She admits to being in scores of fights, but said she was always careful not to cross the line.

Santa Ana Police Chief Paul M. Walters said although Ruiz’s background may have been a stumbling block earlier in her career, it now gives her a special affinity for her work with the department’s gang unit.

“Her background certainly enables her to better understand the mind-set of the people she deals with,” Walters said. “Officers that come from the middle class or other types of areas sometimes find it frustrating and troubling when they deal with people that seem lost or caught up in gang lifestyles.”

Gregory C. Brown knows about the odds Ruiz beat to make it. He escaped the gang scene in his childhood home, Watts, and is an assistant professor of criminal justice at Chapman University in Orange.

Most people who use education, religion or hard work to rise above the dangerous allure of gangs usually have to leave their neighborhood to do it, Brown said. “That’s what I did. But she’s there every day, dealing with the place that could have killed her.”

Ruiz joined a gang in her freshman year at Valley High School.

“There was a lot of peer pressure to join a gang, and that day I knew I had better find some friends if I wanted to survive,” Ruiz said.

Amid the chaos of her teen-age years a piece of advice from her father lingered in her mind.

He had told her to become a police officer. That job, he said, would bring her respect and give her life a direction. That was the way to a better world. Become a police officer. “In my father’s eyes, police were like soldiers of Christ,” she says.

She filed the advice away, and nearly abandoned it when she ran with her gang during high school. Then something happened that made Ruiz stop and take stock.

On New Year’s Eve, 1978, Ruiz was at a party in a neighboring area, a place she had never been before. She was visiting the home of her sister’s fiance, and the mood was festive as people danced on the lawn.

The music was interrupted by a series of loud pops, like someone had ignited a string of firecrackers. Ruiz felt a burning slash across her neck, and something passed through her long, dark hair. She turned just in time to see the slug tear a hole in the chest of a young man standing a few feet away. Screaming, she dropped to the ground and crawled on her stomach toward the house.

“The shooting kept going, and we all scrambled to get inside,” she said. “I said to myself right then: ‘Do I want to live like this?’ That could have been me out there, dead. I’m only 17, do I want to die?”

It was just one of many killings she had witnessed, but the heat from the bullet and her fear affected her like never before. An inch away from death, she thought to herself, just an inch. It was then that she vowed to escape the chaos of the streets.

Ruiz has come a long way since that night, but sometimes the memory seems too close. Last Halloween, she and her partner were sitting across from a teen-age hangout when gunfire erupted from a passing car.

“There was this girl dancing on the step in front of this restaurant, I remember her moving up and down,” Ruiz said. “Then she was shot. Her head just exploded. It seemed to happen in slow motion, like a movie.”

The two officers sped after the car, and caught up to the occupants as they gathered a few blocks away to celebrate their deed. “They never saw us until we busted them.”

As she talked about the arrest, Ruiz cast her eyes downward, the memory of the girl’s gruesome death still jarring loose a jumble of violent memories.

Lost friends, lost lives, and the night she felt the touch of the bullet. “At least we caught them this time. At least now I’m on the side that’s trying to make a difference.”