A mom of two students at Robb Elementary School says she was handcuffed by officers as the shooter was still inside before she jumped a fence and ran into the school to safely retrieve her children on Tuesday.
Angeli Rose Gomez, a mother of a second-grader and a third-grader, told the Wall Street Journal she drove 40 miles to the Uvalde school and was one of numerous parents begging and yelling at the officers to enter sooner to take out 18-year-old gunman Salvador Ramos.
After a few minutes, she said, a US Marshall placed her in handcuffs, stating that she was under arrest for intervening in an active investigation, according to the Journal.
It took almost an hour before Ramos was killed by a specialized US Border Patrol tactical team, authorities said. In that time, he gunned down 19 school children and two teachers.
Gomez recognized a few local Uvalde police officers and convinced them to tell the marshals to remove the cuffs.
Once freed, she distanced herself from the crowd, jumped the school fence, ran inside the school building and grabbed her two children. The three sprinted out of the school together, she said.
Gomez told the Journal she decided to charge the school herself as officers waited outside the building “doing nothing.”
“They were just standing outside the fence,” she said. “They weren’t going in there or running anywhere.”
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A spokesperson for the US Marshals Serviced denied her account — telling the Journal that deputy marshals never cuffed anyone outside the school.
Harrowing videos captured the heartbreaking wails of parents who feared for their children’s lives as they watched police loiter outside the school building.
“What are you doing — get inside the building!” a person howled in one video, as another screamed, “Go protect the kids!”
Some fathers also hopped the fence and smashed in classroom windows to pull their kids out, a first responder told The Post.
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The mom said she wasn’t the only parent targeted by officers on the scene, which she described as chaos.
She said she saw police tackle a father to the ground and pepper-spray another. Officers tasered a third dad, she said, when he approached a school bus with students on it to collect his child.
“They didn’t do that to the shooter, but they did that to us,” Gomez told the Journal, referring to herself and other parents. “That’s how it felt.”
