OAKLAND — The plea deal was written, signed, and only needed to be approved by a judge. It contained two key provisions: Andrew Ruiz wouldn’t serve prison time for sexually abusing a 12-year-old girl, and he wouldn’t register as a sex offender either.
But within a week of Ruiz signing the agreement that required him to plead no contest to the least serious charge he faced, everything changed. The same girl’s mother called Oakland police to report that she’d learned Ruiz had violated his restraining order by continuing to contact the girl, online and in person, according to court records.
Now Ruiz, 24, is back in jail being held without bail, and facing a new slough of child sex abuse counts. Alameda County prosecutors have charged him with sodomy and statutory rape of a minor, possessing child pornography, contacting a minor for sex, and sending harmful material to a minor, as well as a misdemeanor charge of disobeying a court order.
All of the alleged crimes occurred from 2025 onward, while Ruiz was out on $110,000 bail facing child molestation charges involving the same girl, court records show.
It all started in April 2024, when the girl’s mother reported the alleged sexual abuse to police. Ruiz met the girl through one of her friends and began texting her, she testified at a preliminary hearing last March. He was charged with committing lewd acts upon a child, multiple times, starting when she was 12. At the preliminary hearing, the girl said Ruiz warned her not to come forward, but gave short answers to most of the questions prosecutors asked her and requested several breaks.
“It was something like, ‘Don’t tell anybody because I could go to jail,’” she testified.
Prosecutors allege that Ruiz had some contact with the girl again as early as February 2025, after he’d been charged and posted bail.
But at her police interview in September, the girl told authorities that they’d started talking on a near-daily basis almost immediately after she took the stand and testified against him in March. In late August, they allegedly met up with a party, where prosecutors say Ruiz sexually abused the girl again.
The girl’s mother found out about it after discovering recent nude picture exchanges between Ruiz and the girl on Instagram, police said.
The alleged abuse occurred just two weeks before he signed a plea deal that would have given him credit for the day he spent in jail when he was arrested and a two-year probation term, with no requirement to register as a sex offender, court records show. The agreement required him to plead no contest to statutory rape in return for charges of committing a lewd act upon a child and possessing child pornography to be dropped.
But now that deal appears to have been thrown into uncertainty. On the day he was supposed to be formally sentenced for the 2024 case, a judge postponed the hearing until at least Dec. 9. On Dec. 7, Ruiz is due to enter a plea in the new sex abuse case. He remains jailed without bail in the meantime, court records show.
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