The Patriot Post® · The Lakewood Church Assailant Was a Mess

These days, when an individual is confused about his or her gender, it confuses everyone else, too. Watching the Houston Police Department and then the media sort out the sex of the assailant at Lakewood Church in Houston was enough to make your head spin.

Fortunately, the only person who died in Sunday afternoon’s assault was the female would-be murderer because two off-duty police officers providing security for the church acted quickly. The bad news is that one man at the church was shot, and the attacker’s young son was critically wounded in the head by crossfire because she brought him with her.

“A shooter’s motive for opening fire in celebrity pastor Joel Osteen’s megachurch remained unclear,” the Associated Press reported on Monday, though the news outlet was sure to include in that same opening paragraph that the firearm was “an AR-style rifle.” The weapon will always dominate media coverage because the Left’s agenda is undermining the Second Amendment and disarming the American people.

There are some hints about the motive, however.

Was this woman a member of the gender cult? Maybe. The 36-year-old female assailant emigrated from El Salvador and had recently used a male name and pronouns. Two days later, it’s still unclear if her confusion went beyond aliases or if it had much to do with her motive, but we do know she’s not a male white supremacist and that she’s a Hispanic who attacked Lakewood Church just before its all-Spanish service.

A racist and transgender murderer killed six at a Nashville Christian school last year, so it’s reasonable to suspect a similar hate crime at another church.

Still, it seems more complicated than that this time.

Other clues might include the would-be killer’s politics. The same AP that purported to be unable to discover any motive reported in paragraph 16 that “investigators also found antisemitic writings by the shooter” and her “rifle had a ‘Palestine’ sticker on the buttstock.” Other reports indicate the sticker said “Free Palestine,” a genocidal slogan.

However, the assailant expressed an affinity for Bernie Sanders, who is Jewish, so maybe anti-Semitism isn’t a motive, though it’s also unlikely Sanders’s particular brand of politics — unlike for the attacker who nearly killed several congressional Republicans in 2017.

Furthermore, Lakewood Church is not Jewish, though Osteen’s prosperity message resonates with a diverse group of about 45,000 weekly attendees at his basketball arena-turned-megachurch.

The most likely motive actually seems to be a sordid family dispute over custody of the young boy now fighting for his life.

The assailant’s mother reportedly attends Lakewood, and her former mother-in-law seems to have sought pastoral counsel for legal proceedings related to custody. The attacker’s ex-husband is currently in prison in Florida for failing to register as a sex offender. His family is Jewish.

Part of that custody dispute involves the fact that the assailant has a troubling mental health history, including emergency detention in 2016. Neighbors said they’d been targeted, harassed, and threatened by the woman before, and they had reported her to authorities. The assailant also had prior arrests dating all the way back to 2005 for assault, theft, marijuana possession, forgery, evading arrest, and unlawfully carrying a weapon. She was detained by ICE in 2010.

Yet she was still able to legally purchase multiple firearms.

Ultimately, this may simply be a case of a toxic brew. Perhaps an unstable woman dabbled with gender identity and Jew-hatred along with a bit of Marxist oppressor ideology, all while battling former in-laws over custody. Eventually, she snapped.