Over the weekend, a mother of one, a 7-year-old boy, went into a big church in Houston and opened fire. This was a very disturbing incident, leaving two people injured, including her son. Genesse Ivonne Moreno, 36, went into Lakewood Church and started shooting sporadically.
However, her mother-in-law says this incident was a “completely preventable horror.” According to her, Moreno had a history of serious mental illness, particularly schizophrenia. “My daughter-in-law, when she was taking medication for schizophrenia, was a very sweet and loving woman,” Walli Carranza, the mother-in-law, said.
“But mental illness is real illness, and when family members seek emergency protections, they’re not doing so for their own sake but for the sake of the person who is ill,” her Facebook post read on February 12th.
In an interview with KHOU, the mother-in-law also said that when she heard the news, she feared that More might be the shooter. This is because she had a history of strong violence whenever she had her episodes.
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“She had a particular kind of schizophrenia that caused her to become violent. She threatened her husband, my own son, and we still couldn’t get intervention,” she said.
For now, investigators are still trying to understand why Moreno opened fire at the church. She threatened the security guard, who had no other choice but to let her in, and then she started firing an AR-platform rifle. According to reports, she purchased this gun in December 2022.
Of the two people injured in the shooting, her son was one. He got a shot in the head and is in critical condition at a hospital. Whether or not he would survive this ordeal and live a normal life is unsure. The second victim was an older man of 57 years.
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A bullet hit him in his leg, but doctors have released him from a medical facility already. As Moreno fired into the church’s hallway, she did not know that there were two off-duty officers present. One was a 28-year-old Houston Police Department officer, while the second was a 38-year-old agent with the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission.
Both officers engaged the shooter and hit her fatally, bringing this terrifying ordeal to an end. Carranza claims that they could have avoided this attack. She claims that the state of Texas should have never allowed her to own firearms, knowing her mental state.
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“The fault lies in the child protective services of Montgomery County and Harris County that refused to remove custody from a woman with known mental illness that was not being treated and with the state of Texas for not having strong red flag laws that would have prevented her from owning or possessing a gun,” Carranza wrote.
Texas has no red flag law that would allow authorities to take weapons from a person thought to be in crisis. Therefore, Moreno was able to not only get a gun at will but go out and hurt people. Moreno’s case further emphasizes that authorities need to review gun laws regularly and that potentially dangerous people should not own firearms.
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