In ‘Uvalde Mom,’ the Failures of Law Enforcement Get Reexamined

The harrowing film follows Gomez’s account of the tragedy. It was like any other morning. Until it wasn’t, and she received the call every parent in today’s America dreads: an active shooter had entered her sons’ school. Gomez got in her car and arrived to find the state of chaos captured by scores of iPhones and seen by the world. Lining the perimeter were hundreds of police officers standing idle as desperate parents pleaded for their children’s lives.

“We’re wasting time here,” Gomez recalls telling law enforcement. In response, she was brutalized—thrown to the ground and handcuffed. After promising to calm down, the officer removed the cuffs and Gomez went running to retrieve the boys herself. Other parents, as the film shows via cell phone footage, weren’t as successful.

In the aftermath, much of the public heralded Gomez as a hero. Meanwhile, a series of reports confirmed that officers on the scene that day didn’t just refuse to enter the school for more than an hour—they handcuffed and assaulted several despondent parents who tried to enter. The Texas public safety chief called their response an “abject failure,” and Gomez very publicly echoed these criticisms. Further, she detailed how she watched as other parents were pepper sprayed, tased, or tackled to the ground for begging police officers to act, and in one case, just approaching the bus to pick up one of their kids.

“[Police] didn’t do that to the shooter, but they did that to us. That’s how it felt,” Gomez told the Wall Street Journal at the time. She added, “The police were doing nothing. They were just standing outside the fence. They weren’t going in there or running anywhere.”

Where her rage reverberated with many Americans, others—including local police—took offense. The backlash was not only swift but sinister. For many months, Gomez faced a barrage of frightening harassment from Uvalde officers in retaliation for her harsh criticisms of them in the press. Their intimidation ranged from a false accusation of “illegal immigrants” in her car, parking outside the homes of family members, and lording past infractions over her head. Ultimately, Gomez was even sent to jail (in a facility seven hours from her sons) for violating probation on a previous charge stemming from a domestic violence dispute with their father. Because there was no substantiating evidence of the violation, she was released 17 days later. The city of Uvalde has since denied that its officers harassed Gomez or that anyone with the Uvalde Police Department placed her in handcuffs on May 24, 2022. Multiple witness accounts, however, beg to differ.

For Prado, the “relentless” targeting of Gomez, was particularly shocking to capture in real-time. “Even Angelique says it in the film. It’s like, here she was being harassed—and with the possibility of going to prison—while the law enforcement officers that were present on the day of the shooting were literally walking around town at the grocery store like nothing ever happened,” Prado told Jezebel. “That, to me, was like, incredibly surreal…that this was happening to this woman, yet all these law enforcement officers weren’t being held accountable.”

The how of it all is established with needful context about Uvalde as a community. It’s a small town that for generations has resided at the nexus of issues the country writ-large routinely suffers from: racism, gender-based violence, policing, and guns. The shooting only compounded its long-held divisions as to how it should be governed safely and justly. And, this is Texas, after all.

Lately, Gomez said the tide is turning some, at least where advocacy is concerned. Parents and community members who were previously opposed to Gomez’s frankness in the media and local gun control activists’ persistent messaging are coming around to the notion that these age-old systemic issues are worth railing against.

“Since I used my voice, there’s actually others using their voice now, too,” Gomez said. “At one point, my community didn’t want media here. But then I started talking to the parents like, ‘This is where our story is going to live on forever and stay alive.’ People that initially didn’t support me now are like, ‘Now we know where you’re coming from.'”

When there’s so much to take away—from generational trauma inflicted by inherently corrupt systems to a mother’s tenacity—what do Prado and Gomez hope audiences remember?