A boy who was shot in the head at celebrity pastor Joel Osteen’s Houston megachurch on 11 February has lost “a portion of his frontal lobe” while recovering at the hospital, according to his grandmother.
In a Facebook post three days after the shooting, Walli Carranza said her seven-year-old grandson, Samuel Moreno-Carranza, “has lost a major part of what makes us who we are” after “half of his right skull [had] to be surgically removed during two surgeries done in less than 24 hours”. Samuel had endured “cardiac arrest multiple times, and no one can determine whether he has significant brain activity because his scalp tissue is too friable” to let doctors attach electroencephalogram wires to him, Carranza added in a post that doubled as a criticism of the US’s lack of meaningful gun control.
“Samuel had no protection of his God-given right to life,” Carranza’s post also said. “Because the very same legislators who claim to be ‘pro-life’ [in the public debate about abortion] believe that unbridled gun rights matter and the right to life does not! Insanity!”
Carranza’s update on Facebook came as authorities continued trying to determine why Samuel’s mother, Genesse Moreno, stormed into Lakewood church and began firing a rifle styled after an AR-15.
The attack ended when a Houston police officer and an agent with the Texas alcoholic beverage commission shot Moreno to death. Samuel – whose mother had brought him to the church – was struck in the head during the exchange of gunfire that killed Moreno. A 57-year-old man was also hit, in the hip.
A hurricane of misinformation emerged from early reports about Moreno, but authorities have dispelled much of it. Officials acknowledged Moreno would use both male and female aliases, but they confirmed through interviews and past police reports that she identified as a woman rather than as trans.
Authorities learned, too, that Moreno kept antisemitic writings at her home, feuded with her Jewish former in-laws and had placed a Palestine sticker on the stock of the rifle she took to Lakewood church.
But investigators had so far stopped short of saying whether her decision to mount the church attack may have been influenced by Israeli military strikes on the Palestinian territory of Gaza after Hamas’s 7 October attack on Israel.
Carranza, for her part, has dismissed speculation about whether Middle East wartime politics drove her former daughter-in-law to violence as “reckless and irresponsible”.
She has instead sought to highlight how Moreno had a long record of criminal misdemeanors as well as a documented history of mental illness – yet she was able to legally buy the rifle she brought with her to Lakewood church, which is in the former home of the Houston Rockets basketball team.
Carranza at one point filed papers in connection with her son’s divorce from Moreno, accusing her of threatening people with guns and being careless with how they were stored. For instance, Moreno at one point kept an unlocked gun in her son’s diaper bag and threatened to shoot her ex-husband while their son slept in the back of the car.
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On Facebook, Carranza described reporting Moreno more than 20 times to child protection officials in the Houston area, but they “did nothing”.
Carranza said she had “compassion” for Moreno because “her brain was broken” by her mental illness.
But she said lawmakers who “allow anyone to buy an assault weapon” despite the warning signs they might demonstrate had no excuse. She called on Congress to repeal the constitution’s second amendment, which grants citizens the right to bear firearms. In a follow-up Facebook post, she asked for prayers for Samuel, lamenting that he was once again fighting for his life after he had initially done so when born three months premature in 2016, as the New York Times reported.
“There is no other prayer to pray,” Carranza wrote.