As the media’s attention turns to police officers who stood outside a school in Uvalde, Texas, and refused to enter while a mass shooter killed 21 people on Tuesday, a mother is being hailed as a hero for going into the school to rescue her two children as the carnage unfolded.
According to a report in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, Angeli Rose Gomez said she drove 40 miles to get her children at Robb Elementary School, where they’re in second and third grade, respectively.
Having found that police hadn’t entered the school, Gomez said she implored them to do something, was put in handcuffs by U.S. marshals, then convinced local police to get her freed.
After that, she jumped the school fence, ran inside the school, and escaped with her children, according to reports.
(As more details come in on the Uvalde school shooting, The Western Journal will provide the news and analysis you won’t hear from the mainstream media — all from a Christian, conservative perspective. If you support our coverage, please consider subscribing.)
The Journal’s report comes amid mounting frustration over police officers outside the school who didn’t charge in after a gunman barricaded himself inside the building.
The gunman, 18, was killed by a Border Patrol team after he went on a massacre that lasted over 40 minutes, The Associated Press reported. (The Journal said the timeline was longer — an hour between when the shooter began firing and when the tactical team entered the building.)
Before that, however, parents and onlookers pleaded with police to enter the building.
Javier Cazares, whose daughter Jacklyn was killed in the attack, said he had brought up the idea of charging into the school with other bystanders because police refused to.
As a parent, would you have gone inside the school?
“Let’s just rush in because the cops aren’t doing anything like they are supposed to,” Cazares said, according to The Associated Press. “More could have been done. They were unprepared.”
WARNING: The following video contains graphic language that some viewers will find offensive.
This video make so much more sense now. The cops literally stopped parents from helping their kids. pic.twitter.com/zhQfUjlpjd https://t.co/DqgZUH3uCC
— Matt Novak (@paleofuture) May 25, 2022
“The police were doing nothing,” Gomez said, per the Journal, outside of Robb Elementary. “They were just standing outside the fence. They weren’t going in there or running anywhere.”
According to the Journal, Gomez said she was “one of numerous parents who began encouraging — first politely, and then with more urgency — police and other law enforcement to enter the school sooner.” After a few minutes, she said, U.S. Marshals handcuffed her, telling her she was being arrested for intervening in an active investigation.
“Ms. Gomez said she convinced local Uvalde police officers whom she knew to persuade the marshals to set her free,” the Journal reported.
After this, she “made her distance from the crowd, jumped the school fence and ran inside to grab her two children. She sprinted out of the school with them.”
It’s worth noting that the U.S. Marshals Service told the Journal their deputies didn’t place anyone in handcuffs.
“Our deputy marshals maintained order and peace in the midst of the grief-stricken community that was gathering around the school,” a spokesman for the Marshals said.
What they didn’t do, however, was enter.
There might be a reason for this. Victor Escalon, regional director for the Texas Department of Public Safety, said police inside the school were evacuating students and staff while they called for backup.
“There’s a lot going on,” Escalon said.
Perhaps there was. However, the footage of law enforcement outside the school doing nothing to save the children inside from an active shooter brings back memories of the Parkland, Florida, school shooting in 2018, where Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel was permanently removed from his position after his deputies’ inaction during the massacre in which 17 people were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
We don’t know enough to say this is a repeat of those failures. What we can say is that this hero mother did what police officers either couldn’t or wouldn’t do.
