It’s a manhunt worthy of the best action movies of the 1980s. Since Monday, the Texas police have been on the trail of a gunman suspected of having killed five people, including a 9-year-old child. More than 250 local and federal agents were looking for this suspect, a Mexican identified as Francisco Oropeza, in this southern state of the United States. The FBI confirmed Monday that the hunt is continuing and asked the media to respect the mourning of the families of the victims.
Considered armed and dangerous, the shooter “can be anywhere”, warned during the weekend the sheriff Greg Capers, in charge of the investigation. Authorities have offered an $80,000 bounty for any information leading to the location of this “monster,” as FBI Special Agent James Smith called it.
The victims complained about the suspect’s noise
The 38-year-old gunman is suspected of opening fire Friday night into Saturday inside a home in Cleveland, near Houston, killing five people, all from Honduras and aged 9 at 31 years old. Entering the country illegally, Oropeza had already been expelled from the United States to Mexico four times, according to a source within the immigration authorities quoted by CNN.
Wilson Garcia, one of the survivors, lost his 9-year-old son and his wife, as well as “two other people who died protecting my 2-and-a-half-year-old daughter,” he said. “I have no words to describe what happened”, “it was horrible”, testified, deeply moved, the father who escaped through the window.
According to local authorities, the suspect was practicing shooting in his garden when neighbors, including Wilson Garcia, asked him to stop the noise so that a baby could sleep. In response, he walked into his neighbors’ house and shot “execution-like, basically in the head” of several residents, Sheriff Capers said. Among the survivors, three children “covered in the blood of the women who had lain on them to protect them” were discovered and rescued, he added.