Washington, Apr 30 (EFE).- More than 200 agents went door to door this Sunday in search of clues that would allow them to arrest the man accused of shooting to death 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 the neighbors’ houses, asking questions and looking for clues,” explained the San Jacinto County (Texas) sheriff, Greg Capers, who has led the response to the tragic event.
Federal agencies such as the FBI are also involved in the investigation and have been providing assistance since yesterday.
To encourage residents to help, authorities are offering a $80,000 reward for anyone who can provide information leading to the arrest of the shooter, identified as Francisco Oropesa, 38, a Mexican national.
On Friday night, Oropesa was shooting in the garden of his house 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, were not there. I could fall asleep.
Oropesa responded by breaking into his neighbors’ homes to shoot them in the neck and head, as if it were an “execution,” the sheriff’s office has described.
Yesterday Saturday, the authorities thought they had the suspect cornered in a wooded area near the scene of the shooting; but, they lost their trail and, this Sunday, after expanding the search perimeter, they acknowledged that they do not even know if the suspect is still in the area.
“We don’t know where he is,” said the agent in charge of the FBI office in Houston, James Smith, at the same press conference this Sunday, who admitted that right now the security forces have no clue about the whereabouts of the suspect.
However, the FBI believes Oropesa may have contacted his friends for help in escaping, and now agents are trying to identify those friends for questioning.
Security forces have already questioned the defendant’s wife “two or three times” and are in contact with her, Capers said.
The FBI and the sheriff’s office have distributed images of the suspect on social networks and, in addition, signs in Spanish have been posted in the neighborhood to ask for collaboration from the Hispanic community in San Jacinto County, a rural area of Texas with only 27,000 inhabitants. .
Authorities on Saturday spelled the suspect’s name as “Oropeza,” but this Sunday they changed it to “Oropesa.”
Sheriff’s deputies knew something was up when they received a tip Friday night.
They immediately went to the house; But, while they were on their way, the county communications center began receiving multiple calls from the 911 emergency number alerting that a shooting was taking place in the place where the agents were going.
When officers arrived at the home, the shooting had already occurred and the suspect had fled.
Inside the house there were ten people and five lost their lives. The names of the deceased are Daniel Enrique Lazo, 8 years old; Sonia Argentina Guzman, 25 years old; Diana Velásquez Alvarado, 21 years old; Obdulia Molina Rivera, 31, and José Jonathan Cáceres, 18.
According to the sheriff’s office, when the agents arrived at the house, they found the adults already dead, while the minor was taken by helicopter to a hospital, where he died.
The Police saw how two of the deceased women were in the bedroom of the house and their bodies were on top of two of the children who survived, in an apparent attempt to protect them from the bullets.
Shootings are becoming more frequent in the United States, and by 2023, there have already been at least 176 mass shootings, according to the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive (GVA).
GVA defines a mass shooting as one that ends with four victims, whether dead or wounded, not including the perpetrator of the attack if he died or was injured during the event.
