The mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde was marked by layers of tragedy. Not only were the lives of 21 people, mostly children, violently cut short, but the police who arrived refused to confront the shooter for over an hour.
Angeli Gomez, a farmworker and mother of two children at Robb Elementary, raced from the field where she was working to the school at about 100 miles per hour as soon as she heard about the shooting. But when she arrived and tried to get into the school to save her children, U.S. marshals handcuffed her to stop her from entering. Local Uvalde police released her and she immediately ran into the elementary school, where she could still hear gunshots, and went to her children’s classrooms to save them.
She was able to get both of her sons and their classes out of the building – while the police officers stood by. For her heroism, the local police threatened her with legal action if she told her story about how the police stopped her. But she refused to be intimidated. While at work, she later gave an interview on what happened that day to CBS .
Angeli Gomez’s story reminds us that we can’t rely on the police to keep us safe – we have to rely on ourselves. We don’t need these repressive capitalist police forces to arrest working parents trying to protect their children. We need to rely on and build our own forces to protect us from the violence of this society.
