On Feb. 11, a child and a man were wounded and a woman was killed after the woman opened fire at evangelist leader Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston. Osteen said the shooting happened between services as people were arriving for Sunday’s Spanish service.
Houston police identified the suspect in the shooting as Genesse Ivonne Moreno, 36. Moreno entered the church with her 7-year-old son wearing a trench coat and carrying a rifle and a backpack she claimed held a bomb. Moreno began firing in a hallway outside the sanctuary of the church, but did not reach the main sanctuary. She was killed by two off-duty officers who opened fire. One officer has been identified as an agent with the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission, and the other is a Houston police officer, according to Police Chief Troy Finner, who gave a press conference on the shooting late Sunday. It is still unclear who shot Moreno’s son, who remains in critical condition after being shot in the head.
A dispute between Moreno and her ex-husband’s family, some of whom are Jewish, appears to be related to the shooting, Houston Police Commander Chris Hassig said in a news briefing Monday. The shooter also made several statements during the course of the incident, but law enforcement has declined to release those details.
The shooting made national headlines because the Lakewood Church is the largest in the U.S. with services for thousands each Sunday and Osteen is a world-renowned evangelical pastor. But as soon as the shooter’s troubled history of mental illness and criminal acts surfaced, Fox News, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and several large MAGA GOP accounts on Twitter/X began claiming Moreno was transgender, an assertion for which there is no evidence. Law enforcement officials said Moreno previously went by multiple aliases, including using both male and female names, but said there is no evidence she was transgender.
As late as Wednesday, Fox News was still claiming in headlined stories that Moreno was trans, stating in one story’s kicker below the headline: “Transgender Texas megachurch shooter displayed swastikas, regularly harassed residents while wielding rifle, neighbors say.”
Fox News, Greene and others were eager to tag Moreno as a leftist and trans, without evidence.
On Feb. 12, Greene wrote on her Twitter/X account which has three million followers, “Not only was the shooter a trans from El Salvador, she also had a gun engraved with ‘Free Palestine’ but investigators can’t say if she was politically motivated or not.
“When this country starts being truthful, regardless of who’s feelings get hurt, we will solve many problems.”
Greene is known for her anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and policy, as well as her xenophobic views toward immigrants.
Sara Gonzales, Executive Director of Defend Our Kids, Texas, and host of the conservative talk show “Sara Gonzales Unfiltered” on Blaze TV, identified Moreno as trans on her Twitter/X account early Monday, with a breaking news headline. Her tweet garnered 4.7 million views. In a single tweet within a thread, Gonzales said simply, “Transgender ideology kills.”
Lisa Elizabeth, Producer/Booker for “The Culture War” at TimCast.com and a former Congressional comms director and UPenn alumni with nearly 50,000 followers, responded to Gonzales, “When they said woman I KNEW it was a man/trans. Knew it.”
A Community Note on a tweet citing three trans and one nonbinary mass shooter stated: “Between 2018 – 2023 only 3 shooters, not 4, were identified as trans-gender.
“In the same timeframe 2826 were identified as cis-gender in mass shootings events.
“So out of all mass shootings only 0.10% of the shooters identify as trans-gender while 99.89% identify as cis-gender.
“https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/past-tolls.”
What is true of Moreno is that she was in a sometimes violent custody battle with her ex-husband for their son — the boy who was shot at Lakewood Church. Moreno’s ex-mother-in-law, Rabbi Walli Carranza, accused Moreno and Moreno’s mother of keeping Moreno’s child away from the father in 2022 divorce and custody proceedings.
During a news conference Monday, Houston PD said Moreno had a Palestine sticker on her AR-15 and they also found antisemitic writings that may also be linked to her ex-husband’s family. Houston’s KHOU 11 News reports that Moreno previously attended the megachurch as did her mother.
“These two women knowingly and intentionally harmed both (the child) and his father, Enrique Carranza,” Rabbi Carranza wrote in court documents.
“There are several possible reasons that have been proposed by law enforcement, child protective service social workers, by each of these two women themselves, and even by the pastoral staff of Joel Osteen’s Church when (Carranza) sought assistance from the church, (Moreno’s mom) attends when trying to understand what caused the women’s behavior,” Carranza wrote.
During the 2022 divorce proceedings, Moreno’s ex-mother-in-law also petitioned to become the managing conservator of the child. Rabbi Carranza claimed Moreno has a diagnosis of schizophrenia and Munchausen by proxy, had been investigated by Child Protective Services four times, and was found to have harmed her child twice. Carranza alleged Moreno pointed a gun at her ex-husband and stored an unlocked handgun in her son’s diaper bag.
Neighbors of Moreno chart a long history of Moreno harassing them and being violent and have spoken with local and national news about those incidents since the shooting. Late Monday afternoon, the women held a news conference in the driveway of a home to describe what they said they have been enduring and to criticize what they said was officials’ failure to respond to their reports about Moreno.
Various neighbors had complained to police about Moreno and women living nearby said it was no longer safe for them to be out in the neighborhood when Moreno was nearby. They said they frequently spotted Moreno wearing a trench coat while carrying gun cases and a long rifle in and out of the house.
One neighbor, Jill, said, “Her way of intimidation was to bring the gun cases in and out, crossbows, you know she’d come out and she’d have her gun cases out there, and she’d do a ‘Hail Hitler’ sign or flip you off or b—-. You know, it was something every day.”
Jill said. “There’s just so many things, and it just seemed to keep escalating. And then when she started targeting other women in the neighborhood, that’s when we all really started getting concerned because we didn’t know how far it was going to go. I wasn’t the only one being targeted.”
In a statement Monday, Rabbi Carranza said in part, “Although my former daughter-in-law raged against Israel and Jews in a pro-Palestinian rant yesterday this has nothing to do with Judaism or Islam. Nothing! But this is what happens when reckless and irresponsible reporting let’s people with severe mental illness have an excuse for violence.”
Carranza said, “My daughter-in-law when she was taking medication for schizophrenia was a very sweet and loving woman….If today you suspect that someone needs mental health care never cease your efforts to secure their safety and that of others.”
Key questions remained Wednesday about Moreno’s motive in the shooting, and police have given no details about where and how she obtained the rifle. The shooting is yet another in Texas and other states involving shooters who legally obtained guns despite criminal history and mental health problems. How the Lakewood Church shooter bought the AR-15 rifle despite her diagnosed mental illness and long criminal history is being probed by police, who had no comment for PGN at presstime.