Neighbors of the shooter at Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church revealed years of harassment and threats from her, with law enforcement and officials failing to adequately respond.
The shooter, Genesse Ivonne Moreno, had a history of tormenting her neighborhood and had a criminal record.
“Four years I’ve been through hell. I have reported this, reported this, reported this, and it’s gone on deaf ears,” one neighbor said. “I’ve had psychological officers up here. Since they won’t answer their door, they won’t do anything: ‘Until she hurts you, there’s nothing we can do.’ So, everybody keeps saying on all these big news stations, ‘If you see something, say something.’ That’s bulls—. Because I’ve been through it. I’ve talked to everybody. I’ve probably called every one of your news stations trying to get someone to take this on.”
Several neighbors reported instances of intimidation, including Moreno displaying antisemitic writings and making false police reports.
“No one would do anything. Nobody would call me back. And yet everyone’s still on these stations saying, ‘See something, say something.’ Nobody should have died. Nobody should have been hurt. This should have been handled years ago. And here we are again,” the neighbor said.
“I knew it was only a matter of time before she did something,” Linda Giutta said. “We did something, we said something.”
“We cannot do anything more than what we did. We tried to stop this. We tried to help her, we tried to help us, and we tried to help the public. Something needs to get done. I don’t know what needs to get done, but it needs to get done. This was a big church. By the grace of God, Jesus alone, the only person that died was the one who brought the weapon in.”
“It looked really odd, and I thought it was weird, but I thought she’s weird anyway, so you never know what this girl is up to, so I just watched my back and just left it at that,” 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.”
“One of the songs had the lyrics ‘somebody’s going to get f—– up tonight,’ Jill said. “She’d back it up and replay it for hours on end.”
“This was a weekly occurrence. She was after me,” Jill said. “At first it was always like, ‘Oh, it’s because I’m transgender.’ Then it was ‘because we’re Mexican.’ Then it was because ‘we’re Black.’ And then every time, depending on what her narrative was for that day, she’d change the reason you were picking on her. You know?”
“My daughter even called Conroe PD and raised Cain with them and said, ‘Aren’t you guys going to do anything? Are you going to wait until I get the phone call that my mom is dead?'” Jill said. “It’s gotten very scary.”
“She wanted to scare my grandkids, so she went out and got the long rifle – OK, they’re from Minnesota, they shoot, they know what’s going on. Well, she went to the backyard, opened a blind that had never been opened before in four years, and was putting the rifle out of it, like she was going to gun down on somebody,” Jill said.
Despite numerous attempts to seek help from authorities and officials, no significant action was taken.
“There’s five of us, five families that are going through this. We decided we have to do something about it,” Giutta said said. “We talked to commissioners, we talked to elected officials, we waited. Some of the ladies talked to police. We waited for a police officer to call his headquarters, and he got somebody over from his headquarters that was talking about mental health. He stayed with us for a while. From there, he suggested we go to legal. From there, we went to the legal department. We got some information from them. We went into their conference room.”
The shooter’s former mother-in-law sought advice from pastoral staff at Lakewood during a bitter child custody battle in 2022.
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