The county sheriff acknowledges that the alleged suspect in the shooting, identified as Francisco Oropesa, could be “anywhere.”
Texas police are maintaining for the second consecutive day the search operation for the alleged shooter who killed five people in San Jacinto County, near the city of Cleveland. Authorities identified an eight-year-old boy among the victims. Four other people were found dead inside the home, all of them immigrants from Honduras.
County Sheriff Greg Capers reported late Saturday night that three children “covered in blood” were found alive at the scene and transported to the hospital. Two fatalities were found by the front door, two others in a bedroom, lying on top of the two unharmed minors “with the intent to protect the children,” the sheriff explained. The lifeless body of the eight-year-old boy was in another of the rooms.
Two adults also managed to survive the carnage, authorities said. Not everyone who was in the house at the time belonged to the same family, but all those who were shot “were shot from the neck up, almost execution style,” Capers told a press conference.
The suspect is 38-year-old Francisco Oropeza, who opened fire on his neighbors after they asked him to stop shooting in their backyard at around 11:30 p.m. because their baby could not sleep. It was not the first time that neighbors called Oropeza’s attention. Police had already received several complaints about him for firing his gun in the yard, an action that could be illegal.
The shooter, in an inebriated state according to indications, responded that he would do “whatever he wanted” in the yard of his house before breaking into his neighbors’ and starting shooting. He used an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, which investigators recovered.
Police believe Oropeza fled a forest located a few kilometers from the scene. It is using sniffer dogs and a drone to locate the individual, who may be armed. But the county sheriff acknowledged that, with more than 48 hours having passed since the shooting, Oropeza “could be anywhere.”
It is a new mass shooting in Texas after the cases of the Uvalde school, in which 19 children and two teachers were killed, and the Walmart in the town of El Paso, in which 23 other people died. In the rest of the United States, there have been at least 18 shootings that have left four or more dead so far this year, according to a database maintained by Northeastern University. A new record. In all, there have been 175 mass shootings.
Republican leaders in the state of Texas have rejected calls for tighter gun restrictions. In response, President Joe Biden has renewed his push for a ban on assault weapons, including the AR-15 rifle, precisely the weapon Oropeza would have used.
“As a nation, we owe these families more than our prayers,” said Biden, who signed the first significant gun safety legislation in three decades in the wake of the Uvalde massacre last year. “We owe them action.”