Beaten by burglars, family to move

A week after his quick thinking, brave 13-year-old daughter foiled a robbery attempt by four armed bandits, a College Point auto dealer said that he plans to move from the sleepy northeast Queens neighborhood where he has lived for six years.
“These people [the robbers] have been planning this for a while,” said Gamaliel Ruaz, 37. “The main thing right now is moving.”
Ruaz is still deciding where and when the family of eight - which includes Ruaz’s in-laws, wife, niece, nephew and children - will move, but he knows that he wants to get out of the neighborhood as soon as possible.
Last year he was mugged at gunpoint on March 14, and earlier this month, he and his family began noticing strange characters around their home - ringing the bell and asking for past residents and staking out places the family frequents. A native of Colombia, Ruaz looked up parking tickets for vehicles outside of his workplace and matched the license plates to those of cars used in the break-in.
“Now we see that they’ve been stealing the mail … I know who these people are. They know all of my family, every one,” he said, pointing to his daughter, Katie Ruaz, and stepson, Julian Loaiza, 16, both of whom were home during the break-in.
“Now we are laughing about it because everyone is safe, but we were terrified about the whole thing,” he said.
On Wednesday, March 7, four men, wearing ski caps and hoods, followed Ruaz’s 18-year-old niece into the home on 125th Street. All four were armed - three had 9 mm pistols and one carried a .45 caliber pistol, the family said. The would-be burglars corralled the four residents into two different bedrooms and demanded money.
The men pistol whipped Ruaz and Loaiza, threw the father and his stepson to the floor and kicked them. Ruaz said the robbers even snatched his losing lotto tickets from his shirt pocket during the heist.
At the time, Katie was doing her math homework in her room when she heard her stepmom scream. The quick-thinking teen then looked into the hallway and a hooded man walking up the stairs with a black handgun.
“I was scared. I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, they’re going to shoot my whole family,” Katie said.
“I made sure there was no one in the hallway,” she said. “I thought, ‘I need my phone. I need to go get my phone.’”
All the while, she could hear the burglars downstairs asking her father for the keys to the safe and to hand over all the cash and valuables in the house.
Ruaz snuck into the hall to retrieve her cell phone from a backpack then ran back into her room and hid in the closet as she called the police. A few minutes later a phalanx of cops from the 109th Precinct swarmed the house, forcing the burglars to jump out the windows to escape. Police caught up with and arrested the four men - Robert Soto, 38; Jose Caban, 32; Jose Lopez, 43; and Rafael Ortiz, 38; all of the Bronx - not far from the two-story home. The officers also recovered three handguns at the scene, said Detective Kisoo Kim, 109th Precinct Community Affairs Officer.
As the officers led Ruaz and the rest of the family out of the house, Katie was told by the 9-1-1 operator to stay on the phone in thecloset until the dispatcher could verify the brave teen was safe.
“When I was outside, I realized that my daughter was not outside with us, and I tried to go back in,” Ruaz said, explaining that the police told him a little girl had called the cops. “I feel proud. She saved everybody.”
When asked how she managed to keep her cool, Katie shrugged and said, “I had to do it. Because if I hadn’t then I might not have a family anymore.”