Although Roxana Ruiz is only twenty-one years old, she has experienced more pain and suffering than most adults twice her age. A single mother, Ruiz has been forced to fight for herself every day to make sure her child is safe and well. However, the single mother found herself in a living nightmare when a man entered her home on May 8 in Nezahualcóyotl, Mexico, and raped her.
Ruiz confessed to authorities that she killed her rapist, Sinai Cruz after he finished assaulting her inside her home. Although many people feel that the single mother acted in self-defense, Mexican law enforcement arrested her and charged her with murder, so she faces sixty years behind bars in a Mexican prison for strangling the man who raped her inside her home.
Mexican law enforcement officers arrested Ruiz on May 8 after she killed her rapist. Authorities charged her with homicide, and she is scheduled to be heading to court. She is expected to stand before a judge during her scheduled appearance on Tuesday. If this single mother is convicted of killing her rapist, she could be sentenced to thirty to sixty years behind bars.
Ruiz explained her side of the story in a letter written to the feminist collective Nos Queremos Vivas Neza. She explained that she was leaving work at a potato stand when a woman who worked at a nearby bar asked her to join her for a drink. When she was leaving the bar, Cruz, who frequented the bar, offered to walk her back home where she lived with her four-year-old son.
When they arrived, Cruz tried to force Ruiz to invite him to spend the night because he lived far away.
“He was being stubborn when we arrived. He obligated me to allow him in,” Ruiz wrote. “He insisted that he lived too far to allow him to sleep in my room. He insisted so much that he scared me, as an idiot, I accepted.”
She tried to set up a bed on the floor for Cruz, but he jumped on top of her when she went to bed.
“He started to remove the clothes (,) he beat me, he raped me, I was in shock, I just wanted to defend myself,” she wrote.
She struck Cruz on the nose at one point, and he started bleeding. That’s when he threatened to murder her, telling her, “Now you are really going to die.”
Ruiz managed to find a T-shirt that she tied around her rapist’s neck, choking him to death.
“I strangled him, I felt fear, terror, I didn’t want him to hurt anyone else, I felt lonely, denigrated, I felt worthless, I felt it was all my fault for having trusted those people.”
Mexican authorities did not conduct a health exam to confirm that she had been raped. Instead, she was charged with murder.
“They did not take my statement into account so that I could defend myself. My only crime was defending myself from the man who raped me,” Ruiz wrote. “Maybe I should have let my attacker get away with it, go away and maybe leave me dead or injured so as not to have to live what I’m living.”