(The Center Square)–A Venezuelan national illegally in the U.S. was arrested on Tuesday after being on the run since allegedly killing a north Texan 18-year-old on Sunday.
The Grapevine Police Department said its officers, working with Texas game wardens, had taken into custody Daikerlyn Alejandra Gonzalez Gonzalez, the suspect tied to the death of Texan Ava Moore. The Office of the Attorney General, Texas Department of Public Safety, the Dallas Police Department and Homeland Security Investigations were involved in tracking down two alleged fugitives they say were involved in her death.
Ava Renee Moore, 18, was killed Sunday night while kayaking on Lake Grapevine, a reservoir roughly 20 miles northwest of Dallas. She had just graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy Preparatory School on May 19 and accepted her appointment to join the U.S. Air Force Academy’s Class of 2029. She was a graduate of Timber Creek High School in Ft. Worth.
In addition to Gonzalez Gonzalez, another suspect was arrested who allegedly helped her flee the scene, Attorney General Ken Paxton said.
“On Sunday, Daikerlyn Alejandra Gonzalez Gonzalez – an illegal alien from Venezuela – struck and killed an 18-year-old woman, Ava Moore, on Lake Grapevine with a jet ski. The suspect then fled the scene with a male illegal alien, subsequently committing a hit-and-run after striking another vehicle. Paxton’s Fugitive Apprehension Unit tracked down and arrested the illegal aliens connected to the crimes, working with the Texas Parks and Wildlife, the Grapevine Police Department, the Dallas Police Department, the Texas Department of Public Safety, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security,” he said.
“Ava Moore’s senseless death was caused by an illegal alien who should have never been in our country in the first place. My heart breaks for Ava’s family and friends, and my prayers are with them as they face this tragedy,” he said. The OAG is continuing to work with local, state, and national law enforcement partners involved in the case.
NBC 5 News reported that witnesses saw two women on a jet ski hit Moore while she was kayaking on Sunday and drive away. Several Good Samaritans carried Moore out of the water and provided first aid as did first responders, but it was too late. “Moore died from severe traumatic injuries,” the outlet reported.
Moore was a star basketball player in high school and was determined to join the Air Force and serve her country, an Air Force Academy official said. She never got the chance.
“We lost an exemplary teammate this weekend – Cadet Candidate Ava Moore, whose passion for leadership and service left an impact on everyone she met. Ava’s constant happiness and attitude helped her squadron get through the challenges of the Prep School, and her drive to excel was on display as she sought out leadership positions to improve herself and her team,” Lt. Gen. Tony Bauernfeind, U.S. Air Force Academy superintendent, said in a statement. “Our team is focused on providing support to Ava’s family, her Prep School Squadron, the Prep School Women’s Basketball team, and the entire Academy family.”
The academy is providing a “full complement of support services, including Academy chaplains, mental health professionals, leaders, and others” it said.
“Our thoughts and prayers go out to Ava’s family, friends and loved ones. Ava, may you find blue skies and tailwinds as you rest forever in peace,” it added.
Moore is the second young Texas female to be killed by Venezuelans illegally in the country, after Houstonian Jocelyn Nungaray, The Center Square reported.
Their deaths occurred after a record number of more than 1 million Venezuelans illegally entered the country under the Biden administration, The Center Square exclusively reported.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.