When a gunwoman opened fire at one of Houston’s largest megachurches in February 2024, leaving her 7-year-old son with two bullets lodged in his brain, the Houston Chronicle’s breaking news reporting revealed troubling red flags.

Genesse Moreno had a documented history of mental health struggles and violent threats. Family members and neighbours repeatedly warned authorities that the small child she was raising appeared undernourished and frail.

I was part of the team of investigative, data and public safety reporters who inevitably asked: How does someone with a decades-long trail of red flags slip through every safety net designed to protect her, her family, and her community? And how could authorities fail to help a medically fragile child they knew was in danger?

What followed was a months-long records collection effort that revealed institutional blind spots across Texas’ law enforcement, family court, and social welfare systems. 

How the team dug deep

Over three months, we collected dozens of recorded 911 calls, thousands of social media posts, and hundreds of pages of law enforcement reports and court filings, persistently challenging
bureaucratic delays and legal red tape.

We talked to Moreno’s family members, friends and neighbours, as well as government officials, to document every interaction that she had with authorities in the decades leading up to the attack.

We pinpointed more than 100 missed opportunities where officials could have intervened. 

A mental health breakdown, explicit threats of deadly violence, a stockpile of assault-style weapons, a public plan of attack. The evidence was overwhelming; the consequences, irreversible.

I visited Moreno’s son in the hospital a month after the shooting. He had had multiple surgeries to remove two bullets from his brain and repair his shattered skull. He was semi-conscious and could no longer speak or walk. 

Interactive storytelling techniques

A story like this deserved a new approach. Our team resolved to present our findings so readers could experience the full, relentless drumbeat of warning signs building toward tragedy that we had discovered.

Our story opens with audio recordings of Moreno’s ultimate plea for help. “All I need is help,” she shouted as she fired dozens of gunshots in the church.

Then, we take readers back through two decades of warning signs that led to that moment, inviting the audience to listen and watch as Moreno spirals into a paranoid and destructive rage, just as dozens of police officers, court officials, and social workers had heard or seen from her in the years before the shooting.

As the reader scrolls through the interactive story, the 911 call audio plays, with Moreno telling officers that she wants to shoot her husband and threatens a neighbour with a gun. The audience hears her family members and neighbours call police and child protective services, too, warning Moreno had a “child and a known diagnosis of schizophrenia.”

The project walks readers through snippets of documents showing that the child was named in nine family court cases where relatives and family friends testified that his physical and emotional well-being were suffering in Moreno’s custody.

Next comes the barrage of social media posts. It all builds up to a final video where Moreno plainly lays out her plan to attack.

As we introduce each piece of evidence, we plot it in an interactive, multimedia timeline that anchors the narrative. What begins as scattered dots in the early years intensifies into a storm of warnings by 2024, making it impossible to ignore just how much authorities had to overlook to let this tragedy unfold.

This in-depth approach of investigative reporting, data-driven analysis and interactive storytelling can’t be done for all of our coverage, but it’s increasingly a larger part of our newsroom strategy and a way to signal to our readers how committed we are to telling the most important stories in Houston and beyond.

We embrace innovation when it enhances our journalism, and our coverage of this megachurch shooting exemplifies that.

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