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There have been two recent high profile shootings. On February 11th, J. Genesse Moreno opened fire at Joel Osteen's megachurch in Houston. On February 14th, nearly two dozen were injured at the Super Bowl victory parade in Kansas City. Even beyond the typical reaction to gun violence, both have culture war angles. But the details of the cases and the media coverage have been different.
Moreno was born in 1987 during the El Salvador civil war. A quarter of the Salvadoran population emigrated; half of them came to the US, where they were granted Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and allowed to work.
There's been a lot of interest in her name and sex. Why did she call herself Jeffrey? Was she transgender like the Nashville shooter? Men commit homicide at about seven times the rate as women, so we're surprised when we hear about the exceptions. She struggled with her mental health and there is some overlap between schizophrenia and gender dysphoria.
When there's significant culture war over an issue, it can be hard to decide what to trust. When the media reports there is "no evidence" that she's trans, what does that really mean? Here, the plain meaning is correct. Jeffrey is her birth name, which is unusual but not bizarre. The media repeatedly claims that she uses multiple aliases, but this seems to just be her name. Sometimes she goes by her middle name. She's consistently used female pronouns, maintained a feminine appearance, and one of her crimes was theft of women's cosmetics. I don't know old she was when she left El Salvador, but she was born in a country with ten times the homicide rate of the United States.
Her public arrest record starts when she turned 18 in 2005. She consistently pleaded guilty for reductions to misdemeanors. In 2005, she was sentenced to 20 days for failure to stop. In 2010, she was sentenced concurrently to 180 days for assault; 30 days for theft; and 75 days for evading arrest.
Conviction of two or more misdemeanors could result in the loss of TPS status and removal. However, she was able to stay in the USA, and may have later gained permanent residency from her marriage. In her 2022 plea she claimed to be a US citizen.
The vast majority of Salvadorans were Catholic, but at some point Morena converted to Islam. Despite the controversy of interfaith marriage, in 2015, while working at the Spaghetti Warehouse in Houston, she met her future husband: Enrique Carranza III. He was Jewish with a criminal history of attempted sexual assault on a child. His mother says this was a statutory rape case, and the girl was 14 (the registry says 12) with a fake driver's license indicating 17.
After their marriage in September 2015, Enrique reports she became abusive. She was on medication for schizophrenia and lupus, but stopped during her pregnancy and they became estranged. In November 2016, she gave birth three months prematurely. On her son Samuel's birth certificate, she reported the father as deceased. Perhaps due to postpartum psychosis, she was involuntarily hospitalized.
Enrique found out about the birth, but their relationship did not improve. He accused her of neglecting their child. They accused each other of making threats. Their marriage continued to deteriorate, and Enrique moved to Florida in 2021, where he failed to register as a sex-offender and is currently in prison. Moreno dismissed her lawyer, choosing to represent herself, but the divorce was eventually settled in 2022, with her retaining custody of their son.
In December 2023, she bought an AR-15 style rifle and put a Palestine decal on it. She had been making anti-semetic Telegram posts and fought with her neighbors.
On February 11th, she brought her son to the church. Under a trench coat, she had her AR-15; in a backpack a .22 caliber rifle. Brandishing the AR-15, she entered past an unarmed guard and fired in a hallway. Two off-duty police, working security at the church, fired multiple shots. Moreno died at the scene, falsely claiming she had a bomb. A man was hit in the hip, and is recovering. Her son was shot in the head, with uncertain and likely poor outcome. Because of the lack of confirmation that Moreno shot her son, I assume he was shot by the off-duty police.
There's calls to change Texas gun laws, such as adding a red flag law. People are mostly focusing on her mental health, but depending on how Rahimi goes, it may make more sense to focus on her conviction of a violent misdemeanor.
A few days later, after the victory parade in Kansas City, a group of teens got into an argument and started shooting in the general direction of each other. At least a dozen people were shot, including Elizabeth Galvan, who died. Channeling their football heroes, the crowd tackled a suspected shooter, and three were arrested: a man, who was released, and two juveniles who remain in custody.
Their names and pictures won't be released until they are charged with felonies, but many are invoking Coulter's Law to explain the delay. Governor Parson called them thugs; Mayor Lucas called this a racist dog whistle, confirming the race of the juveniles.
Mass shootings similar to this happen almost every day. You can look at the gun violence archive and see the repeated tragedy of young black men unable to resolve their disputes, reaching for their guns, and shooting without aiming. They don't make the news, and our picture of gun violence is distorted. As the Times reports:
Lina Hidalgo calling for this will not get it done; if anything it makes it less likely. ‘Tightening the rules around violent crimes getting bargained down to misdemeanors for the nth time’ is a reasonable technocratic thing that Texas might do if it gets around to it, though, and it’s possible that would have stopped this crazy woman from attempting to shoot up a church.
I'd put that in the "not likely anywhere at all". And Texas as a whole can't do much either. These are all local decisions made by prosecutors offices based around a bunch of overworked, understaffed, underpaid ASAs and ADAs doing triage on a messy docket. Dealing with violent criminals as violent criminals is much harder than dealing with them when they are doing other, easy to prove, bad things like shoplifting and being illegal immigrants. Thats why things like the no-pros on shoplifting has such outsized effects. That is a 2 hour bench trial and then with 3 strikes or similar laws you've got someone off the street for 90 days, then 180 then 365, etc. A felony trial is going to take 2 days minimum.
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