‘God is taking me to my future’: How the Rihanna shooting suspect’s life unraveled

Police say that in March, Ivanna Ortiz (right) fired at least 10 shots from an automatic weapon at the house of Rihanna. (Credit: Photo illustration by CNN/Amy Sussman/Getty Images/ABC7 Los Angeles/AP/Orange County Corrections Department via CNN Newsource)

Ivanna Ortiz loved taking her daughter to the movies. She was religious, preferring Christian musicians to secular ones, and she sang in the church choir. She worked as a speech pathologist and ran her own clinic.

“Everywhere she went, she always put a smile on your face,” said Jennifer Oxendine, who was friends with Ortiz in the late 2000s when they attended the same church. “She always just made you feel like a sense that everything’s going to be okay.”

Now, Ortiz, 36, stands accused of attempting the unthinkable.

In March, police say, Ortiz drove to the Los Angeles home of Rihanna, while the star and her partner, rapper A$AP Rocky, were in an Airstream trailer parked in the driveway. She grabbed a loaded AR-15 rifle and fired at least ten shots at the front gate, according to the police report obtained before it was sealed to the public. When the noise of gunshots stopped, Rihanna told investigators, she opened a curtain to peek outside and saw two bullet holes in the glass, realizing she had been standing in the line of fire and had only been saved by the double-paned windshield. Nobody was injured.

In the six months since her arrest, Ortiz has been in custody in Los Angeles undergoing mental health evaluations to determine if she’s competent to stand trial on charges of attempted murder, assault with a semiautomatic weapon and shooting at an inhabited dwelling or camper. The process has been delayed several times. Ortiz has pleaded not guilty and her lawyer, appointed by the Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office, did not respond to requests for comment.

In interviews, former friends and relatives painted a picture of a woman whose mental health changed in recent years, after a bad car accident and as she grappled with losing custody of her daughter. Their characterizations of Ortiz are supported by correspondence and legal filings within hundreds of pages of unearthed court documents and police records.

What is certain is that, in the months before the attack, Ortiz appeared to show a growing obsession with Rihanna. A YouTube account appearing to belong to her posted over a hundred videos in which she read from a prayer journal and, in at least three videos, went on tangents about Rihanna, saying in one that she believed the singer wanted to “kill” her. The pop star’s “intrusive” spirit, she said in another video, was obsessed with her and had been stalking her.

In January, Ortiz sent an email to her ex-husband demanding he “renounce” the singer and “confess that I’m better than her,” court records show. “You gotta let me know so that door can be closed,” Ortiz wrote, according to a copy of the email.

The attack unfolded two months later.

When questioned at the police station, Ortiz only offered one fragment of insight, according to the police report: “I would like to say that I wasn’t attempting murder.”

Ministry and music

Ortiz spent her teen years in Florida and, after graduating high school in Orlando in 2007, became a faithful attendee of the Lighthouse Church, a non-denominational church that never had a permanent location but bounced around vacant retail spaces in the cities of Longwood and Sanford.

Ortiz, who went by “Ivy,” pronounced “ee-vee,” loved Christian music artists like TobyMac and Israel Houghton over secular ones, said Aida Rodriguez, Oxendine’s sister, who attended the same church as Ortiz and Oxendine. Rodriguez called her a reliable friend who gave great advice. Ortiz had lofty dreams of becoming a touring Christian singer, Rodriguez said.

Ortiz would go on trips with the church’s youth group and sing with the choir every Wednesday and Sunday before services. The services were led by the Lighthouse Church’s senior pastor, Kevin Tuck, a former chaplain and police officer, who delivered fiery sermons in contemporary clothes.

Tuck would go on to enter the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. He was arrested and later pleaded guilty to charges of obstructing law enforcement during a civil disorder and entering and remaining in a restricted area. Tuck, who also had suspected ties to far-right group the Proud Boys, was among those pardoned in 2025 by U.S. President Donald Trump. He declined to comment when reached by phone.

Rodriguez and Ortiz grew close outside of church. When Rodriguez got married in 2010 to a man named James, in a ceremony officiated by Tuck, Ortiz was there.

“She was always positive, always looking at the bright side,” James Rodriguez said. “I want people to know who she was before.”

The friendship faded after the Rodriguezes and Oxendine switched to a different church, but the group stayed connected with Ortiz on social media, where they eventually learned in 2014 that she had given birth to a baby girl.

Motherhood appeared to be a point of pride for Ortiz, who posted photos of herself with her daughter on her Facebook page through the 2010s with adoring captions marking milestones.

But the highs of motherhood were met with the lows of a marriage that was coming apart almost as quickly as it began.

A slew of disputes

Less than a year and a half after they wed, Ortiz filed for divorce from her now ex-husband Jed Nikko Sangalang in 2015, according to their final divorce judgement.

The divorce was finalized in 2017 and Ortiz was initially awarded the lion’s share of custody. James Rodriguez would sometimes run into Ortiz at the local movie theatre where he worked. It was always just the two of them, he recalled, and she appeared to be a doting mom who he believed “truly loved her daughter.”

In her work life, Ortiz was a speech pathologist certified to practice in Florida and California, and she owned the Orlando Speech Clinic, according to public records.

Things seemed to shift for Ortiz around 2021, according to three sources who did not want to be identified, including two family members from whom Ortiz became estranged.

That September, Ortiz was injured when the Mercedes Benz she was driving struck a tree and crashed into the porch of a home in St. Cloud, according to the traffic accident report. She was found to be at fault for the accident but, according to public information officer Andrew Sullivan with the St. Cloud Police Department, she “claimed to have suffered a medical episode just prior to the crash” so was cited for careless driving instead of facing more serious charges.

Ortiz’s family came together to support her in the wake of the crash, with one relative sharing a link to a GoFundMe, which has since been removed, to help Ortiz “get back on her feet.”

In the years that followed, Ortiz was involved in at least two more serious car accidents. After one in 2023, Sangalang said Ortiz’s family told him they believed “she was suffering a mental breakdown,” according to publicly available court documents. In 2024, Ortiz suffered injuries after her car was hit by a bus, according to a lawsuit she filed last year against the bus company.

“It’s so sad. She wasn’t always this way,” Ortiz’s cousin, Jazmin Gonzalez, who is known as “Yahweh Jazmin,” wrote in a statement posted to Facebook after the shooting in March.

“Our family tried to help in all the ways you can.” Attempts to reach Gonzalez, as well as several other members of Ortiz’s immediate family, for further comment were unsuccessful.

Ortiz’s legal troubles also mounted. In 2023, she was arrested for “battery (domestic violence)” after a dispute with Sangalang. She was arrested again months later after violating her probation, arrest records show. It appears the charges were dropped after she agreed to complete a “batterers intervention program,” community service and agreed to stay away from Sangalang and not possess a firearm.

The domestic violence arrest helped to spark a tumultuous custody battle, during which Sangalang raised concerns about Ortiz’s use of opioids. He believed she was prescribed them following the 2021 car accident to treat her injuries, saying her legs had been “crushed” in the incident. In a legal response, Ortiz denied his allegations.

Amid the turmoil, Ortiz lost custody of her daughter in 2024. She appealed that ruling, but it was denied two days before Christmas 2025, according to court records.

As of Feb. 16 of this year — less than a month before her arrest — Ortiz was continuing to aggressively fight to regain custody of her daughter, according to the case record. At times, she represented herself in court after several of her lawyers dropped her as a client.

Sangalang did not respond to requests for comment. His former attorney, Hal Roen, said he found Ortiz to be an articulate and well put-together woman during court hearings. Roen never saw any family members join her in court for moral support. She was, he said, usually alone.

Outside of the custody proceedings, Ortiz appeared to be litigious, filing a flurry of small claims suits. At one point, she sought an injunction in an attempt to stop a Billie Eilish concert from happening at the Kia Centre in Orlando in 2025, claiming the show would disturb the peace of the neighbourhood. It was denied by a judge, public records show.

It was not long after that Ortiz began posting videos to YouTube and Facebook of herself reading religious passages nearly every day leading up to her arrest, with some videos including alarming mentions of Rihanna.

“It almost seemed like she needed help mentally,” Aida Rodriguez said of the videos. After she learned about Ortiz’s arrest, Rodriguez said, “I just felt really, really bad that I guess she didn’t get the help that she needed.”

‘You want to kill me?’

Judging by the content on Ortiz’s Facebook and YouTube pages, and by the accounts of her friends, she didn’t appear to be a fan of Rihanna’s music — but she did talk about her a lot.

In one video posted in January, she called the Grammy winner “a witch” and in another, “the devil,” whose spirit was “trying to harass me for a few years now.”

She said Rihanna wanted to kill her, then threatened the singer. “Listen Rihanna, when you die, God is taking me to my future,” she said, seated in front of a refrigerator. “You want to kill me? Shut the f*** up.”

At some point, Ortiz made her way from Florida to California, telling Sangalang, according to his request for emergency custody of their daughter filed days after her arrest, that she was going out of town on a “‘work’ trip.”

On the morning of March 8, a woman driving a dirty white Tesla pulled up outside Rihanna’s home, according to one witness who spoke to police and was described in a police report as a chef who was reporting for her first day of work and parked outside the residence. The witness recalled seeing the woman smirk at her “as if she was about to do something naughty.” Suddenly, she heard a series of “pops,” she told police, and saw a puff of white smoke come out from the passenger side of the Tesla.

Four bullets hit the trailer where A$AP Rocky was sleeping, according to the police report. Rihanna told police she had been near the front window seat when she heard sounds that resembled something hitting metal. When the noises stopped, she opened the curtains and saw bullet holes in the windshield “directly in front of where she had been standing,” the report states. She grabbed A$AP Rocky out of bed and, he told police, she said, “They shooting at us.” They fled to the home through the garage to check on their children and staff, they told police.

At least six bullets hit the front gate of the home and one bullet hit the exterior wall of a room on the second floor of the home that police described as a “nursery room.”

The chef witness, according to the police report, saw the Tesla drive away. Ortiz, wearing a blonde wig, was arrested in the Sherman Oaks neighbourhood of the San Fernando Valley without incident not long after, the report said, and a loaded AR-15 covered in a purple blanket was sitting on the passenger floorboard of the white mud-covered Tesla she was driving.

Neither Rihanna nor A$AP Rocky have publicly addressed the incident, and their representatives did not respond to requests for comment.

Ortiz most recently appeared in court earlier this month, wearing a yellow jumpsuit and dark eye makeup, with her hands cuffed behind her back. When interacting with her public defender, she smiled. She’s expected to be in court next on Sept. 29 for another competency hearing.

Ortiz faces up to life in state prison if convicted.

“It’s just so strange that a good person like that can lose herself and get into so much trouble,” Oxendine said.