People's Pilot, Volume 6, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 March 1897 — AN AMERICAN MURDERED IN A SPANISH PRISON. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

AN AMERICAN MURDERED IN A SPANISH PRISON.

Dr. Ricardo Ruiz, the America* citizen whose mysterious death in a Spanish dungeon at Gupnabacoa, Cuba, has stirred the department of state from its center to its jcircumference, is a graduate of a Philadelphia dental college, which gave him a diploma in 1878. The doctor spent six years in the United States and became so attached to America and Americans that he decided to become a citizen, and when'he returned to Cuba he took his papers of naturalization with him. He opened a dentist’s office and was living peaceably with his wife and children when he Was arrested by the Spanish authorities and thrown into the prison from which he was never to come forth alive. The charge on which the doctor was arrested" is asserted tc be false by even those who sympathize with the cause of Spain. Ruiz had do connection whatever with the Cubans. His associates were all Spaniards. Even his wife is a Castilian. He was charged

with having aided several insurgents in wrecking a Spanish military train a short distance outside of Guanabacoa. If the Spaniards had raised ths merest show of inquiry they would have found that it was impossible for the doctor to have been present at the train wrecking. On the night of the deed he attended a reception just across the way from his own house, and left it at 10 o’clock to return home. Three Spanish gentlemen accompanied him, and stayed at his house chatting until after 11 o’clock. As the-train was wrecked at 10:30 o’clock that night it was impossible for Ruiz to have been one of the wrecking party. When he left the United States Dr. Ruiz took with him a lot of books which were his favorites. Among these were the ife of Patrick He“L cmfwyp shrdlum ington,” “Webster’s Speeches” and “Cooley’s Constitutional Limitations.” The doctor was a native of Cuba and at the time of death was 46 years old.