Before Houston Church Shooting, Warning Signs and Gun Purchases

Those who knew the woman who opened fire on Sunday with an AR-15 rifle inside Lakewood Church in Houston said the warning signs had been flashing, off and on, for years.

She kept numerous guns, including, at one point, in her son’s diaper bag, according to a relative — firearms that she was able to acquire even after the relative said she had been involuntarily hospitalized in 2016 for psychiatric treatment.

Her neighbors said the woman, Genesse Ivonne Moreno, sometimes displayed aggressive behavior that frightened them. She directed antisemitic rants at her Jewish in-laws during a protracted and bitter divorce and custody dispute. At one point in the summer of 2022, her angry outbursts became so vitriolic that the police in Conroe, Texas, were asked to check on the well-being of her young son.

The officers found firearms in the home but did not remove them, according to Rabbi Walli Carranza, the boy’s paternal grandmother, who had requested the welfare check.

“They said yes, she has guns, but that’s legal in Texas,” Ms. Carranza said. “She can rant at you all she wants and not be mentally ill. Her rants were very profane and they were horrible, and they were very antisemitic.”

Ms. Moreno bought the assault-style rifle in December that she used in the attack, officials have said. She attached a sticker with the word “Palestine” to the stock of the weapon.

In an interview with The New York Times on Tuesday, Ms. Carranza described years of worsening interactions with her daughter-in-law, who died during a gunfight with two off-duty officers on Sunday inside Lakewood Church. The church, led by Pastor Joel Osteen, is one of the nation’s largest megachurches.

Ms. Moreno had her son, 7, with her when she opened fire in the hallway of the church, law enforcement officials said. The boy was struck in the head by a bullet during the exchange of gunfire. Officials have not yet said who shot the boy. He was in critical condition on Tuesday.

Ms. Carranza said she did not fault the officers for what happened to the boy. Instead, she said, she blamed state child welfare officials for leaving the boy with his mother, and the state of Texas for not adopting a “red flag” law that would have allowed the police or family members to seek a court order to remove the weapons from Ms. Moreno’s home.

Federal law prohibits someone who has been involuntarily committed for mental health issues from possessing a firearm; such a person would also be barred from buying weapons from federally licensed dealers. But it was not clear whether Ms. Moreno’s previous hospitalization met the federal standard for the law to apply.

Though Texas has no red flag law, it bars issuing licenses to carry handguns to people with serious psychiatric disorders, including people who are taking medication to prevent the disorders from recurring.

Officials in Houston have said they were still looking into how Ms. Moreno obtained the two weapons she carried with her to the church — the AR-15 rifle she used in the attack, and a .22-caliber rifle that was not used.

For Ms. Carranza, the shooting followed years of concerns and fears and efforts to take greater control of the young boy’s life even after her son divorced Ms. Moreno in 2022. Court fights over the boy continued, Ms. Carranza said, and there was to be a hearing in May on the family’s bid to get conservatorship over the boy.

“This was a three-pronged fail,” Ms. Carranza said. “She should not have been able to buy a gun ever, not with that mental health history. She should have been receiving the mental health care that she needed.”

Ms. Carranza said she did not believe the attack was motivated by any kind of religious ideology. Though her former daughter-in-law had at one time been a practicing Muslim, she said, “this has nothing to do with Islam. This ranting, I’m sure, was fueled by mental illness.”

Neighbors in Conroe noticed and grew concerned about Ms. Moreno’s behavior, which they said was threatening at times. “One day she drove up in my front yard, like, just in the street, and she stopped her car and gave me a ‘go to hell’ look, like ‘I’m going to hurt you,’” said Farrah Signorelli, a teacher who lived three doors down from Ms. Moreno and taught her son in school. “I was scared. I watched every step I took.”

Ms. Moreno’s reasons for attacking Lakewood Church in what officials said would have become a mass shooting remained unclear. Ms. Moreno had a family connection to the church: Her mother was one of several thousand people who attended services in its cavernous sanctuary in a former basketball arena.

Ms. Carranza said that at one point, around 2019 or 2020, she reached out to Lakewood Church out of desperation, hoping for help in watching out for the welfare of her grandson. She said she talked to a “pastoral counselor” there, and was unsure whether anyone from the church contacted Ms. Moreno or her mother.

“They did offer to talk with her; I don’t know if that ever happened,” she said. “We were looking for anyone who could help us. It’s very difficult when there’s nothing else you can do.”

A spokesman for the church, Donald Iloff, said no one could be found who remembered speaking with Ms. Carranza. “I’m not saying it didn’t happen, but I have no one that has a recollection of that at all,” Mr. Iloff said. He added that Ms. Moreno’s mother may have attended services, but there was no record of her being active in the church.

Ms. Moreno’s mother did not respond to requests for comment.

The Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office directed questions to the Conroe Police Department, which did not respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services said the agency was “investigating the shooting” alongside law enforcement, but was prevented by law from discussing confidential family matters.

When Ms. Moreno married Enrique Carranza III, Ms. Carranza’s son, in 2015, they were living in Houston. They seemed to get along immediately, Ms. Carranza said, despite their different religious backgrounds.

“When my son met her, she was a practicing Muslim,” but did not appear to be overly serious about it, she said “My guess is that she was searching for something that would make her feel better, because she quickly grabbed on to his Judaism.”

At the time, Ms. Moreno was taking medication for schizophrenia and she was “doing beautifully,” Ms. Carranza said.

Things changed after she became pregnant and had to stop the treatment, Ms. Carranza said. Soon, she said, Ms. Moreno’s behavior became more unstable. Then for a time, Ms. Moreno disappeared altogether, only to reappear when she gave birth prematurely to a baby boy at a Houston hospital in 2016.

After the birth, Ms. Carranza said, Ms. Moreno was involuntarily admitted to a psychiatric hospital — St. Joseph’s in downtown Houston — and stayed there for several weeks. Christopher Hassig, commander of the Houston Police Department’s homicide unit, said Ms. Moreno was put under an emergency detention order by the department.

At some point after her release from the hospital, Ms. Moreno went to live with her mother in Conroe. Over the next few years, neighbors began to complain about her erratic and threatening behavior. But there were times during that period when she seemed better.

“She could act very well — she was a very good actress,” said Ms. Carranza, who lived in Colorado Springs and moved sometime later to France. “They stayed at my home for a couple of weeks in 2020.”

It was during that time, Ms. Carranza said, that she discovered that Ms. Moreno kept several handguns. “My grandson handed me a gun out of his diaper bag,” she said.

While she said the police did not take weapons from Ms. Moreno in Conroe after she called in July 2022, Ms. Carranza said, in court filings as part of the couple’s divorce that police officers had taken weapons away from her earlier, including in Colorado Springs, where she lived for a time. Ms. Moreno was arrested in April 2022 on charges of unlawful possession of a weapon in Fort Bend County, outside Houston.

By that point, Mr. Carranza, who according to court records was frightened by his wife’s behavior including violence against him, filed for divorce. But the process stretched on for years. He won custody of their son, but then lost it again.

Ms. Moreno, who had a history of arrests for minor offenses, pointed to Mr. Carranza’s own criminal history: a conviction for attempted sexual assault of a minor more than a decade earlier, stemming from what Ms. Carranza said was a teenage relationship with a younger girl.

When Mr. Carranza moved to Florida, Ms. Moreno reported him to local officials for not registering there as a sex offender, Ms. Carranza said. He was eventually charged with that crime and is currently imprisoned in Florida, she said.

Ms. Carranza said that she had not heard from Ms. Moreno since 2022. After learning of the shooting in Houston from news reports on Sunday, she said she worried at first that her daughter-in-law and grandson might have been at the church, in attendance with Ms. Moreno’s mother. She tried calling but got no response.

She said she grew more concerned at the description of a female attacker accompanied by a boy who looked to be about 5, which is how her grandson could appear, even though he was 7.

“Sometimes you just know,” she said. “So I called Houston police and asked them to do a welfare check.” She said it may have helped identify Ms. Moreno, “because apparently she didn’t have ID on at the time.”

Edgar Sandoval contributed reporting from San Antonio.