An armed woman was killed Sunday after walking into Lakewood Church and opening fire, according to police.
Multiple independent sources tell KHOU 11’s Jeremy Rogalski that Genesse Ivonne Moreno, 36, was wearing a trench coat and a backpack when she entered the church with a child and a long rifle. The child was also shot and was taken to a hospital in critical condition, police said.
Houston Police Chief Troy Finner said a 57-year-old man, an innocent bystander, was also shot in the leg.
Moreno used an AR-15 that had “Free Palestine” written on it, according to a federal law enforcement source. Investigators are trying to determine whether she was politically motivated or a disturbed individual, the source said.
What we know about Genesse Moreno
Moreno, who was from El Salvador and previously identified as Jeffrey Escalante, had a criminal history dating back to 2005, according to Texas Department of Public Safety records.
Prior arrests include failure to stop and give information, assault of a public servant, assault causing bodily injury, forgery, possession of marijuana, theft, evading arrest unlawful carrying weapon.
Moreno also posted about giving money to Osteen’s church, and indicated that Moreno had attended and was part of that church. Moreno also expressed support for Bernie Sanders.
Timeline of the Shooting
Finner said the shooter showed up at the church in a white vehicle before entering the building from the west side of the parking lot.
Moreno and a 7-year-old boy entered the church just before 2 p.m. and that’s when police said the woman opened fire.
Two off-duty officers — one with TABC and one with the Houston Police Department — opened fire, killing her, Finner said.
Finner said before Moreno died, she mentioned she had a bomb. Finner said a bomb squad searched the church and the vehicle and backpack and found no evidence of explosives.
Finner also said Moreno sprayed a substance on the ground. He said investigators weren’t sure what it was.
Update
‘We do believe that there was a familial dispute that has taken place between her ex-husband and her ex-husband’s family, some of whom are Jewish,’ police said in a press conference.
Police said on Monday she is believed to be the biological mother of the seven-year-old she brought into the church with her.
Update 2
The woman who opened fire inside Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church threatened her neighbors and had a hateful relationship with her son, it’s been revealed.
Genesse Ivonne Moreno, 36, also had a history of mental illness, court documents out of Texas, further reveal – as well as trail of police encounters.
At Osteen’s fabled Houston congregation on Sunday she used an AR-style rifle to gun down two victims – one of whom was confirmed to be her seven-year-old son.
The child is in a critical condition after being shot in the head. She was killed by two off-duty cops working security.
The pair lived in a modest $247,400 four-bedroom in Conroe, where neighbors said they were regularly menaced by Moreno. Divorce records further revealed how she had a contentious split with the boy’s father, a registered sex offender.
She won custody of the ‘severely’ special-needs child – who CPS noted she ‘demonstrate[d] no attachment to’, and only referred to as ‘the boy.’
The boy’s grandmother, meanwhile, noted in an interview Monday other warning signs she said could have seen the shooting avoided.
‘She tried to run us over,’ said one neighbor of Moreno’s behavior during her four years in Conroe, during which cops and CPS were called to the domicile multiple times.
‘Her way of intimidation was to bring the gun cases in and out, crossbows,’ another anonymous community member, asking not to show her face, went on to recall.
‘She’d come out, have her gun cases, do heil Hitler, flip you off, call you the b-word, or something. It was something every day.’
Others said the woman – who ex Enrique Carranza claimed was a diagnosed schizophrenic during their divorce in 2022 – would regularly ‘swerve’ at them for kicks.
Each interviewed by Fox 26 Sunday added that in the years the family lived there, there’s been one incident with her after another, with police called several times.
Divorce records surrounding her confrontational split with Carranza supported these claims – as did arrest records dating back to 2005, for everything from drugs to theft to assault.
The documents go on to state how Carranza – who ultimately lost custody of the child – is a registered sex offender, and that their son was special needs.
She ‘demonstrates no attachment to the child’ and calls him ‘the boy’, Montgomery County court officials wrote.
In those same records, officials wrote how CPS visited the residence and investigated the family several times, and how during those visits, agents noted how the woman ‘doesn’t make eye contact with the child’
Carranza, meanwhile, wrote that he and Moreno met in 2015 at the Spaghetti Warehouse in downtown Houston where they both worked, and noted how she became ‘abusive’ soon after they married.
In those court documents, several people in the neighborhood just north of Houston made it known that they did not believe the child was safe in Moreno’s care, after city officials awarded her custody despite what appears to be a litany of red flags.
In other divorce documents, Walli Carranza, the child’s paternal grandmother, filed several affidavits as an intervener in Moreno and Carranza’s divorce.
A licensed rabbi, she focused on Moreno’s extensive mental health history and the involvement of state child welfare officials, in the ultimately unsuccessful bid to regain custody.
Investgators, meanwhile, are looking into antisemitism as a potential motive in the shooting, which Rabbi Carranza on Monday said could have been avoided.
This article was updated.
