Firefighter threatened to burn home, sex assault trial told

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This article was published 27/05/2020 (1971 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

She met him when she was 12 while taking taekwondo at a Winnipeg studio.

As a young teenager, she says the man she called “ Uncle Manny” would phone her at home up to three times a week.

“I remember him asking if I missed him, what I dreamed about the night before, and if he was in any of my dreams,” the 46-year-old woman testified on Wednesday.

“He would spend hours listening to me about what was going on in my life at the time,” she said. “He would appear to be compassionate.”

“Uncle Manny” is Manuel Ruiz, a 54-year-old Winnipeg firefighter and martial arts instructor who is on trial accused of sexually assaulting two women.

The woman who testified Wednesday said she was 12 when Ruiz first acted inappropriately with her at taekwondo class. He brushed his fingers over her vagina and breasts as she passed him in a narrow doorway on the way to the change room.

“He would never move,” she said. “He would either be standing, taking up the entire doorway, or leaning against the frame… I know the difference between an accidental touch and a deliberate touch. He would smirk.”

The woman said she and Ruiz maintained contact when she was a teenager, and at 18 she started going with him on errands. Other times, she would visit him at his fire hall.

The phone calls continued, with the conversations turning increasingly “mean” as Ruiz made disparaging remarks about the woman’s sexuality, she said.

“He would say things, like there was something wrong with me,” she said. “He would put out feelers and I wouldn’t always respond and he would say I was asexual or lesbian.”

When the woman was about 25, she asked Ruiz, who was also a private investigator, to help find her father, who had abandoned her family 10 years earlier. Ruiz quickly tracked him down to a Texas prison.

The woman’s father refused to talk to her, sending her into an emotional tailspin, she said.

The woman said she was on the verge of being evicted and “unable to cope” when Ruiz showed up unannounced at her Osborne Street apartment. The woman said she was trying to lead Ruiz out the door when he put his hand down her pyjamas and fondled her.

“He smirked and walked out the door, he didn’t say anything,” she said.

“I didn’t know how to make sense of what happened,” she said. “I was struggling so bad, I didn’t know what I did to bring that on. I thought he was my friend.”

The woman said she was taking medication for depression and “wasn’t in a very good place” when Ruiz returned to her apartment days later and sexually assaulted her.

“I remember being pushed onto the futon and him removing my clothes and him on top of me,” she said. “At that point, I just went numb… complete disbelief.”

Ruiz continued to have sex with the woman without her consent at her apartment, his home and at his Sherbrook Street martial arts studio, she said.

When the woman said she couldn’t do it anymore, Ruiz threatened to burn down her mother’s house and poison her dogs, she said.

In 2001, the woman was managing a Grosvenor Avenue bed and breakfast when she says Ruiz forced her to lodge his teenage son. When, on her boss’s order, she kicked out the boy, Ruiz went to the building and broke down the door with a shovel, the woman said.

The woman ran out the back and called her uncle for help. When they returned to the building with police, they found Ruiz sitting on the couch, calmly sipping tea, the woman said.

“He extended his hand and introduced himself to my uncle and police,” she said.

Ruiz was handcuffed and taken away. When an officer asked the woman if she had anything to tell them, she said no.

“Manuel had always told me as a first-responder, he was connected to other first-responders and nobody would believe me,” the woman said.

Court has been told there is no evidence Ruiz was charged at the time in connection to the incident.

“It made me think that he was right, that he had pull, that I could not trust first-responders,” the woman said.

dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca