5 Bullets Couldn’t Steal Her Future

With a criminal justice degree from Rutgers University, Johanne Vanessa Moise was ready for the future, trying to decide her next step.

Would it be law enforcement? A law degree? Would it be working for the FBI, her dream from the time she was 8? As she pondered, she worked contract corporate security during the day and to make extra money, worked security at night.

In the predawn hours of Sunday, Feb. 2, 2025, five bullets nearly took away the 27-year-old’s future in the parking lot of an Allentown lounge.

Moise, who uses her middle name to those she meets, was just supposed to be working another security shift and saving money. Then came the fight inside the BKK Lounge. She, her boss and others managed to move the fight outside, but then the guns came out. One person, Moise’s boss, Ivan Diaz Jr., was killed. Three others, including her, were injured.

Two men charged in the shootings are awaiting trial in Lehigh County on homicide, attempted homicide and other charges.

“I remember the chaos – the screams, the sirens, the rush of people running toward me and away from me all at once,” Moise wrote in an opinion column in The Morning Call that appeared just 42 days after the shooting. “The pain was unlike anything I’d ever felt, but the fear was worse. Not for myself, but for my family, my friends, the people I loved. Would I ever see them again?”

In a recent interview, Moise said that despite the pain and the chaos, she managed to crawl to the back of her car. People at the scene tried to fashion makeshift tourniquets to help stop her bleeding. In the ambulance, she called her parents and asked them to come to the hospital right away, but merely told them she was in an accident. She didn’t want them to worry.

“I didn’t want to pass out. I felt like if I passed out, I was going to die,” Moise recalls.

The emergency room at Lehigh Valley Hospital (LVH)–Muhlenberg, part of Jefferson Health, was the epicenter for treating the shooting victims that day. 

Trauma surgeon Charles Proctor, MD, treated Moise, who arrived with tourniquets on both legs. He recalls her calm demeanor, despite her pain and stress. “I asked her how she was feeling and she told me, ‘I’m fine, why?’,” Dr. Proctor recalled. 

But Moise’s calmness belied her critical condition. She’d lost a lot of blood. Bullets hit both her legs, with one lodging in her hip. Miraculously, no major arteries were hit.

With her blood pressure dropping, she was rushed into emergency surgery and after that was in the intensive care unit for several days. The day after she arrived at the hospital, Moise had surgery to remove the bullet in her left hip. She says she still doesn’t have full function in her left leg, but continues to work on improvement. 

Dr. Proctor says getting four gunshot victims at once was challenging, but noted “you quickly focus on the task you must do immediately. It very much detaches you from the emotional side of things.”

Once a patient is stabilized, doctors can relax a bit, says Dr. Proctor. “Until then, there’s a high degree of hyperfocus,” he says. “It’s nice to get a win. It feels good when they leave the hospital.”

Moise says the shooting is constantly with her. “I relive it every day,” she says. “I have dreams of me getting shot, of my parents getting shot.” She often thinks about her boss, who didn’t make it. It’s something that’s part of her life now.

“I think I have a lot of anger with myself,” Moise says. “My parents, they almost lost me and I am angry at myself for putting them in that position.”

Moise is an only child. “God, I think, has always had my back,” she says. “From the day I was born, I was blessed with the family I have now. I always feel like I’m going to die favored.”

Moise says part of her always knew she was going to be OK. “I knew that God didn’t want my parents to be alone. My parents just got me through everything. I fought hard through my parents,” she says.

These days, Moise works as crisis intervention training coordinator for Northampton County for the National Alliance on Mental Illness and part-time in registration for a local hospital network. In addition, she’s going to Lehigh Carbon Community College for paralegal studies. 

She hasn’t given up on her dream job of working for the FBI. Field work might be out, given her limited left leg mobility, but she’s still looking to land with the nation’s top law enforcement agency.

Moise says her care at LVH–Muhlenberg was top notch. “They knew what they were doing. They were just kind and nice and they weren’t really treating me like a victim, even though I was.”

Moise’s drive and the love of her parents are pushing her forward. 

“I’m their brave little girl,” she says. “I’ll always be their brave girl.”