- Francisco Oropesa, a Mexican national, is accused of fatally shooting five Honduran neighbors, including an 8-year-old boy, in Cleveland, Texas.
- Over 200 officers and FBI agents are conducting door-to-door searches, with an $80,000 reward offered for information leading to Oropesa’s arrest.
- Authorities believe Oropesa may have contacted friends for assistance in escaping and are working to identify and question those individuals.
Over 200 police officers went door-to-door Sunday searching for clues to capture the man accused of fatally shooting five Honduran nationals, including an 8-year-old boy, in his Cleveland, Texas, home.
“We are going door-to-door with these 200 agents, calling neighbors’ homes, asking questions, and looking for leads,” San Jacinto County Sheriff Greg Capers, who has led the response to the tragic event, explained at a press conference.
Federal agencies such as the FBI also assist with the investigation and have been helping since Saturday.
To encourage neighbors to help, authorities are offering an $80,000 reward for anyone who can provide information leading to the arrest of the gunman, identified as Francisco Oropesa, 38, a Mexican national.
Last Friday night, Oropesa was shooting in the backyard of his home with an AR-15 rifle when one of his neighbors approached him and asked him to stop making noise because it was very late and the family, including some children, could not sleep.
The Mexican national responded by bursting into his neighbors’ homes to shoot them in the neck and head, as if it were an “execution,” as the sheriff’s office described.
On Saturday, authorities thought the suspect was cornered in a wooded area near the shooting site. Still, they lost his trail, and, on Sunday, after expanding to the search perimeter, they acknowledged that they didn’t even know if the suspect was still in the area.
“We don’t know where he is,” lamented the agent in charge of the FBI’s Houston office, James Smith, on Sunday, who admitted that law enforcement has no leads on the suspect’s whereabouts right now.
However, the FBI believes Oropesa may have contacted his friends to help escape, and agents are now trying to identify those friends for questioning.
Capers said that law enforcement has already interviewed the defendant’s wife “two or three times” and is in contact with her.
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The FBI and the sheriff’s office have distributed images of the suspect on social networks, and signs in Spanish have been posted in the neighborhood to ask for cooperation from the Hispanic community in San Jacinto County, a rural area of Texas with only 27,000 inhabitants.
Authorities spelled the suspect’s name as “Oropeza” on Saturday but changed it to “Oropesa” this Sunday.
Sheriff’s Office deputies knew something was up when they received a tip Friday night.
They immediately headed to the home, but en route, the county communications center began receiving multiple calls from the 911 emergency number alerting them that a shooting was happening where the deputies were headed.
When officers arrived at the home, the shooting had already occurred, and the suspect had fled.
Ten people were inside the home, and five were killed. The names of the deceased are Daniel Enrique Lazo, 8; Sonia Argentina Guzman, 25; Diana Velasquez Alvarado, 21; Obdulia Molina Rivera, 31; and Jose Jonathan Caceres, 18.
According to the sheriff’s office, when officers arrived at the home, they found the adults already dead, while the minor was transported by helicopter to a hospital, where he died.
Police saw how two deceased women were in the home’s bedroom, and their bodies were on top of two surviving children in an apparent attempt to protect them from the bullets.
With information from EFE