- A mother who raced to the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, to save her sons was handcuffed by police.
- Angeli Rose Gomez condemned the police for doing "nothing." They could have saved many more lives, she told CBS.
- She said she heard gunshots as she ran to her sons' classrooms to find out if they were still alive.
A mother who was handcuffed outside the Texas school shooting and later ran into the school and pulled her two children to safety has condemned the police for doing "nothing" at the scene.
Angeli Rose Gomez, the mother of two boys at Robb Elementary, told CBS News raced to the school when she heard there was a shooting, hitting speeds of 100mph in her frantic dash to rescue her second- and third-grader sons.
In her first television interview since the devastating shooting on May 24, Gomez, a farm supervisor, said that "when I pulled up, my car was closer to the school than the snipers were."
The police response to the Uvalde school shooting, which killed 19 children and two adults, has been widely criticized after it took the force 78 minutes to enter the building.
She recounted her exchange with police at the scene to CBS. "'I don't see none of y'all in there, y'all are standing here with snipers far away, and if you're not going in there, I'm going in there,' and then [police] immediately put me in cuffs," she said.
When she was uncuffed, she immediately ran toward the school. She told CBS she jumped a fence — which police were trying to cut open — and then ran to her son's class.
She spoke to the teacher to ascertain her son was okay, then ran to her other son's classroom.
At this moment, she said, she heard gunshots fired by the shooter. At this point, police still hadn't entered the building.
"When I got to my second son's class, the teacher didn't want to open the door for me, and that's when they started escorting me out, and as I saw they were opening my other son's door, I ran in to grab my son," she told CBS.
When CBS News correspondent Lilla Luciano asked Gomez her reaction to law enforcement taking over an hour to enter the school, Gomez started tearing up.
"I don't know. I was just thinking that they could have saved many more lives, they could have gone into that classroom, and maybe two or three would have been gone, but they could have saved a whole more."
"They were more interested in keeping us out than getting into that school."
A video uploaded to TikTok shows police at the Uvalde school holding back desperate parents, many of whom were screaming and crying, as they waited to see if their children had survived the attack.
Gomez was not the only relative to be frustrated at the police. AP reported that witnesses were shouting "Go in there! Go in there!" to the police. One father, Javier Cazares, said, "Let's just rush in because the cops aren't doing anything like they are supposed to," he said.
Cazares' fourth-grade daughter, Jacklyn Cazares, was killed in the attack. "More could have been done," he said.
Gomez was told by police not to speak to the media about her experiences at the Uvalde school, according to reports, as she could have charges related to a decade-old obstruction of justice pressed upon her if she sounded the alarm about alleged failings by police.
However, CBS News reported that a judge told Gomez she was "very brave" and would have her probation shortened, allowing her to share her account.
Questions have been raised about the police's delayed and confused response at the elementary school. Texas Democrat Joaquin Castro asked the FBI to investigate the force's actions on that day, asking the bureau to provide a "complete and comprehensive account" of just what police were doing.