A Uvalde, Texas, mom who defied police during the school shooting at Robb Elementary School in order to rescue her children said she is now targeted by Uvalde police.
Nineteen children and two adults were killed in the school on May 24. The police response to the shooting has been a hot-button issue since the incident, in which over an hour passed from the time the shooting started until gunman Salvador Ramos was killed.
“The other night we were exercising and we had a cop parked at the corner like, flickering us with his headlights,” Angeli Rose Gomez said. according to KABB-TV.
Protect #AngeliGomez This woman and all Uvalde parents deserve protection. F* the police. https://t.co/xEc7e56nud
— the professor (@ShabanaMir1) June 27, 2022
She has since put her sons in a place where they live apart from her “just so my sons don’t feel like they have to watch cops passing by, stopping, parking.”
Gomez went to the school after she heard about the shooting and was frustrated with the police response.
The mother told the Wall Street Journal in an interview that she decided to get to the school because she saw police outside the school “doing nothing.”
“They were just standing outside the fence,” she said. “They weren’t going in there or running anywhere.”
She said parents were handcuffed and pepper-sprayed.
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“They didn’t do that to the shooter, but they did that to us,” Gomez said. “That’s how it felt.”
She said her efforts led to her being handcuffed until an officer she knew freed her.
“As soon as they take me off the cuff I see his arm like, give me a little gateway, because I’m real little so a little gateway where I can just run,” she said, according to KABB.
She said she jumped a fence and hit the window of a door after she spotted her older son’s teacher.
Gomez said she told the teacher, “like you already have a gateway out, so might as well just come out like if I’m going to run out with him, y’all just come on too.”
One down, one to go. Gomez said she walked through the school to find her younger son’s classroom
“At this moment I’m jiggling the handle and I’m going pretty nuts like trying to get the door open and it’s not gonna open, so I stand back and the cops are already on me and they’re like ‘ma’am calm down!’” she said.
She said she gave police an ultimatum: Evacuate the classroom or she would not leave.
“Immediately they start evacuating that classroom and my son runs out to me and he’s like, ‘mom, mom!” she said. “I just remember when my son saw my other son, one hugged the other one and said ‘I’m so glad you’re OK’, and the other one said, ‘I was so worried you weren’t.’”
“So it was a big thing because in that moment I was like, they’re really happy to see each other, thank god to each other that they’re alive,” she said.
#AngeliGomez is a hero!! Why haven’t law enforcement been fired yet?? pic.twitter.com/2yOMNClvbY
— Shaquilla (@CHEMISTMAMI) June 22, 2022
Since the incident, she has joined protests calling for Uvalde School Police Chief Pete Arredondo to be fired.
Mark Di Carlo, her lawyer, said a lawsuit could be in the works.
“The fact that he wasn’t fired immediately based upon whatever it is, hours of video, from testimonies such as Angeli’s; is an indication that there is some sort of what, corruption or wrong-doing,” he said.
