As more information comes to light about the "identity-switching Hispanic woman with pro-Palestine, antisemitic beliefs" who opened fire inside Joel Osteen's Houston megachurch on Sunday, neighbors of the now-dead culprit are speaking out and saying the events that transpired over the weekend are no surprise to those who previously encountered the shooter. They also suggested local authorities failed to take adequate action for years to address what neighbors called frightening behavior.
On Monday, a handful of residents in the north Houston suburb of Conroe held a press conference to explain what they witnessed and endured — and how they feel their concerns about the megachurch shooter fell on deaf ears.
According to NBC News, the neighborhood association president told the press that "no one should have died" and "no one should have been hurt" because the shooter's actions "should have been handled years ago."
The shooters' neighbors also said "things got so bad in the neighborhood that five of them spent a day about five months ago talking to local elected officials, police, the sheriff’s office and the city’s legal department," according to NBC News. "They wrote letters to the neighborhood's property management company and met with its lawyer, and they called media, said Linda Giutta, who lives in the neighborhood."
Another resident said she stopped taking walks with her granddaughter to a park in the neighborhood because the shooter "tried twice to hit her while she was out walking."
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“We cannot do anything more than what we did. We tried to stop this,” Giutta said. “We tried to help her. We tried to help us. We tried to help the public. Something needs to get done.”
One of the women, Heather, who gave only her first name out of fear of retaliation, said she made a complaint against Moreno, alleging she threatened her with a handgun on July 4, 2022.
Heather said Moreno had screamed expletives at her when she was watering her lawn early that morning. Heather said that she walked to Moreno's home and that the woman pointed a handgun at her from behind the trunk of her car. She said Conroe police documented the incident as a threat.
"We're being told ‘see something, say something.’ Well, we're seeing stuff, we are saying stuff ... and Conroe PD is not helping us," Heather said. "I don't want to bash them, but help us. Please."
As seems to be the case far too often, not only did neighbors' concerns precede the shooter's violent attack at Osteen's Lakewood Church but so did run-ins with the law. As Mia noted in her deep-dive on the shooter's background, the individual "had a violent, extensive criminal history stretching back to 2005, according to court records reviewed by Townhall" including being "previously arrested for assaulting a public servant, assault causing bodily injury, forgery, theft for stealing cosmetics from a store, evading police, and unlawfully carrying a weapon, among a slew of charges" on a rap sheet that spanned a decade.
