Old ties unbound

As a young girl growing up in a barrio in central Santa Ana in the 1960s, Mona Ruiz would listen to her father praise the police for being “soldiers of Christ.”

“Do you understand?” he would ask. “They do God’s work here on Earth.”

Ruiz never forgot her father’s words--even as a teenager in the ‘70s when she ignored her father’s contempt for gang members and succumbed to the allure of one of the city’s most notorious gangs.

As a heavily made-up gang chola, Ruiz had her share of fights with other female gang members and took pride in her tough reputation. She and a dozen other girls once trashed the home of a new girl at school who dared to disrespect a friend. But mostly she stayed on the sidelines. She witnessed friends slashed to death by knives, saw them killed in drive-by shootings and watched them die of drug overdoses, growing numb to the pain after attending her fourth or fifth funeral for a fallen homeboy.

But her father’s words had planted a seed in the teenage Ruiz’s mind, a seed that grew into an unlikely dream: to become a Santa Ana Police officer.

Her father was among proud family members who were there in 1989 to see the mother of three young children--now ages 12, 14 and 16--graduate from the academy.

“Two Badges: The Lives of Mona Ruiz” (Arte Publico Press; $22.95), co-written with Times staff writer Geoff Boucher, chronicles Ruiz’s transformation from a gang chola to a respected Santa Ana police officer who has arrested hundreds of gangbangers and now heads the department’s Graffiti Task Force, which investigates graffiti-related crimes.

The “two badges” of the book’s title--her silver and gold police shield and the faded tattoo on her wrist from her gang days--symbolize the disparate worlds of 37-year-old Ruiz.

The bridge between Ruiz’s worlds was a part-time clerk’s job at the Santa Ana Police Department that she landed through a high school work program in 1975--a job that caused her to endure the suspicion of police officers who mistrusted having a gang member in their midst and the ridicule of gang members who felt one of their own was fraternizing with the enemy.

“I got tired of playing two different people,” Ruiz said earlier this week. “I just got to the point where I had to make the decision of which life I was going to choose.”

When she did chose, her old gang disowned her and she received some threats, but she was not harmed. For now, she has no plans to remove her tattoo, a flaming heart pierced by a dagger and bearing the name of the gang member boyfriend who became her husband. “For me, it’s just a scar from the past, a reminder.”

In 1985, Ruiz left what she describes as an abusive four-year marriage that forced her at one point to flee to the safety of a women’s shelter.

That same year she left her husband, Ruiz returned to the police department as a meter maid. Four years later, with her life turned around and wanting a better job to ensure her children’s future, she announced her intention to pursue her old dream of becoming a police officer.

Even then, she faced great obstacles. After completing initial written and physical tests, an instructor bluntly informed the then-29-year-old Ruiz that she “was not Santa Ana material.”

“That made me more even determined,” Ruiz said. “It was like a challenge: They were still cued into the old me, and I was determined for them to see the new me.”

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“Two Badges,” which has been optioned by a Hollywood producer, will be launched with a book signing and reception at 7 p.m. Friday at Martinez Books & Art, 200 N. Main St., Santa Ana. A round-table discussion with Ruiz, city officials, community members and former gang members will begin at 5:30.

Ruiz and her book are about to receive a major dose of national publicity: A crew from the “Today” show recently taped a segment with her in Santa Ana that will air the first week of November.

Reviews for “Two Badges” aren’t in. But Santa Ana Police Lt. Felix Osuna, who once mistrusted Ruiz and then became her trusted mentor, read the manuscript before it went to the publisher.

“I think it’s an excellent book,” Osuna said. “It gives a candid description of what she’s had to endure in her life and the obstacles she’s overcome. That in itself makes it a tremendous success story.”

As someone who has known Ruiz for 20 years, Osuna added:

“What amazes me is where she’s come from, because I can recall when we first met and over the years how she has continued to just take on this different type of personality and attitude and grow and mature and go from this young teenage street-gang member that I had so much distrust for to . . . a highly recognized, highly respected police investigator.”

“Two Badges: The Lives of Mona Ruiz” grew out of a 1994 Los Angeles Times story written by Boucher, a reporter who became intrigued by the sight of a female police officer bearing a gang tattoo on her wrist.

Having been burned by a college newspaper reporter who portrayed her as an ignorant, stereotypical former gang member in a story written while Ruiz was attending the police academy, Ruiz wanted nothing to do with telling her story to another reporter.

Besides, she recalled, “I’ve had so much criticism [from fellow officers] since the day I got here that I didn’t know if I could face it again.”

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Ruiz changed her mind after talking to Osuna.

Osuna, she recalled, said: “This is an opportunity for you to reach out. You say you’re doing your job because you want to help people, especially the youth, and what better way than to let them see what you’ve done, where you’ve been, how you got here and what you’ve had to face?”

Ruiz was unprepared for the response her story would generate.

She had off the day the story appeared in The Times. The Police Department received so many calls from readers inspired by her story that a sergeant called her at home and said, “You need to come in here and pick up these messages.”

“I was shocked,” Ruiz recalled. “He was even getting calls from movie producers and agents.”

Gang members and others who had family members in gangs told her they thought there was no way out of gang life until they read her story. Students asked her to speak at their schools. And women involved in abusive marriages told her they were inspired to finally take charge of their lives.

Then there was the letter from a Hollywood producer expressing interest in turning her story into a TV movie. Ruiz is embarrassed to say she had never heard of Steven Spielberg. “I could kick myself for that one,” she said.

Ruiz already had received a phone call from an agent at the William Morris Agency, who wanted to talk to her about turning her story into a book and TV movie. The agency sent a limousine to take Ruiz to their initial meeting in Los Angeles. Osuna accompanied her. “I trust his opinion very much,” she said.

Looking back, Ruiz said, “It’s nice to be noticed, but for me it was kind of scary because I’m not the kind of person who wants everybody to know my personal life.” She said she agreed to do the book in order “to reach out to those in the same situation that think there’s no light at the end of the tunnel.”

Ruiz signed with the agency, which set up interviews between her and three potential authors whose task would be to turn her story into a book. Ruiz said she didn’t feel comfortable with any of the writers, but she did feel comfortable with Boucher, whom she trusted to write her story.

“Geoff was an unknown, and the William Morris Agency felt that was taking a big chance and [that] they may not be able to sell it,” she said. “But I told them, ‘This is who I want.’ ”

Landing a publisher wasn’t as easy as finding an agent.

Ruiz said major publishing houses turned down the book proposal, saying they didn’t feel it was marketable or that it was too similar to gang books that they already had published.

“That kind of made me feel bad,” Ruiz said, “because I kept reminding the agent to let them know that this isn’t just a gang book. That’s just one-third of the story. This is story about a woman that went through all these struggles and survived. That’s what the story’s about.”

When it looked as though they might be unable to sell the book, Ruiz sought the advice of a friend, Santa Ana bookseller Rueben Martinez.

Martinez contacted Arte Publico Press, a nonprofit literary publishing house affiliated with the University of Houston and known as the largest publisher of Hispanic books in the country.

Arte Publico Press publisher Nicolas Kanellos said he jumped at the chance to publish Ruiz’s book.

“I thought that, first of all, it was a tremendous life-affirming story,” he said. “It had the kinds of things we’re always looking for about overcoming adversity and [being] an inspiration to other people.”

Ruiz’s book, Kanellos said, “is a complete story of will--the will to not only survive, but prevail and take control of your life. I was surprised that other publishing houses didn’t see the value in it. It’s a wonderful story.”

Even before Arte Publico Press agreed to publish the book, Ruiz and Boucher were well into writing it.

Once she decided she was going to write about her life, Ruiz said, she began assembling old photographs and writing a journal about all that she had been through, “down to the point when I was born. I was trying to get a history of my family and my roots, so when Geoff and I started sitting down and talking about it and putting it together I would have everything I needed.”

They began meeting once or twice a week, for anywhere from two to six hours. With Boucher’s tape recorder running, Ruiz said, “we just sat there and talked.”

Ruiz said Boucher, a Miami native who is 10 years her junior, also wanted to meet her family members and the surviving members of her old gang. “He really didn’t know a lot about my world when he came into this. He figured the more he understood, the more he can write about it and feel it.”

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To further bring Boucher into her two worlds, Ruiz said, “I took him to areas where certain things happened.”

Places such as the Santa Ana taqueria on Edinger Avenue where, on Halloween night four years ago, she witnessed her first gang-related homicide as a police officer.

That night, Ruiz and her partner had just pulled around the corner of an alley behind a row of stores directly across the street from a restaurant where half a dozen teenage boys and girls--members of one of the city’s gangs--were seated around one of the outdoor tables.

Ruiz and her partner were scanning the faces of the gang members when two cars pulled up.

Ruiz’s eyes were on one of the girls dancing on top of a bench when she heard what sounded like a baseball bat breaking. The dancing girl’s neck jerked back; she was dead before her body slumped to the ground.

Ruiz and her partner caught up to the suspects, who were exchanging “high fives,” in front of a house a few blocks away.

Ruiz later learned that the 15-year-old victim was named Isela. She had never been in any serious trouble. But, much like Ruiz, she had simply hung out with a rough crowd.

The girl’s death would haunt Ruiz, who couldn’t help recalling a different night, 13 years earlier, when she felt a drive-by shooter’s bullet whiz past her own neck on its way to killing a gang member standing in his frontyard.

As Ruiz writes in her book:

“I was Isela, and she was me. I felt as if I had watched myself die.”