While the 18-year-old Texas Elementary School gunman was inside Robb Elementary for nearly an hour before law enforcement finally stormed the school and fatally shot him, parents outside were begging to save their children.

One mother, Angeli Rose Gomez, said that she was detained by federal marshalls for interfering with an active investigation. After several minutes of begging the police to release her, she hopped a fence and rushed into the school, sprinting back out after grabbing her two children.

“The police were doing nothing,” mother Angeli Rose Gomez accused, according to The Wall Street Journal. “They were just standing outside the fence. They weren’t going in there or running anywhere.”

Gomez said that she was able to find her two children and bring them to safety. As she made her way out of the school, she saw other parents trying to enter the building and said they were met with resistance from the police. Gomez told the paper that she saw one parent get tackled by an officer while another parent was pepper-sprayed.

Gomez, a farm supervisor, reportedly drove some 40 miles to the school after she learned her second and third-grade children were at risk.

Gomez says that “she was one of numerous parents waiting outside the school who began encouraging—first politely, and then with more urgency—police and other law enforcement to enter the school sooner,” the Journal report outlined. “After a few minutes, she said, U.S. Marshals put her in handcuffs, telling her she was being arrested for intervening in an active investigation.”

“They didn’t do that to the shooter, but they did that to us,” she said. “That’s how it felt.”