then her parents left the school and Lexi EDUCATION
returned to her classroom. It was the last
time they’d be together.
“My sweet Lexi. Love of my life.
Keeper of my soul. I carried you inside
me. I’m you. You are me. I want to be
with you,” Kimberly, Moreno’s grand-
daughter, wrote in a Facebook post on
May 25. “Now. Not later.”
Moreno was a pastor at the Primera
Iglesia Bautista for 50 years. Now he’s
preparing the sermon he’ll deliver at
Lexi’s funeral on June 11.
He tries hard not to cry in front of
people, especially his family. Not for
old-fashioned machismo’s sake, he
says, but to try to be a stable and help-
ful presence. His wife, Lexi’s great-
grandmother, is the same. “We have mo-
ments that we collapse, of course,” he
says. “But when I’m dealing with peo-
ple and their pain, I have to be strong
for them, because if I break down with
them, I don’t accomplish a whole lot.”
On the afternOOn of May 28, four
days after the shooting, Moreno sits
in the front pew of his church, a mod-
est building just three minutes’ drive
from Robb Elementary School, while
people work in the background to pre-
pare free lunches for the community.
Here, he seeks lessons from his faith.
“Every fiber of my human emotions, in
my mind, cries out to hate. To be angry,”
he says, looking at the pulpit in front of
him. “But then I remember that I have
preached a number of times the words
of Jesus. He said that we must learn to
love our enemies... This experience has
taught me to live those words.”
His decades as a pastor have also po-
sitioned him to listen and support his
granddaughter and her husband, who
he says are suffering immensely. He
believes they too will learn from this
agony, so that someday they and the
other grieving parents may guide oth-
ers through life’s darkest moments.
“I tell them that one of these days in
the future, you may be having a friend
or a couple come to you after having lost
a loved one,” Moreno says. “And you’re
going to be able to share, not something
you read in a book, not something that
you got from a counseling course. You’re
going to be sharing your pain, and how
you survived.” □
‘I’m so sorry for them
that we did not fix this.’