A man suspected of shooting and killing five of his neighbours — including a nine-year-old boy — with an AR-15 assault rifle has evaded capture for multiple days as hundreds of law enforcement officers search for him outside Houston, Texas.
Francisco Oropesa, 38, is accused of shooting his neighbours “execution-style” on Friday evening after they asked him to stop firing off rounds in his yard, as he was disturbing a baby trying to sleep.
After the shooting, Oropesa disappeared, and police believe he slipped past a two-mile perimeter set up around the crime scene to locate him.
Tracking dogs eventually lost his scent, though investigators found clothes and a phone believed to have been discarded by Oropesa while combing the area near the town of Cleveland, north of Houston, where the incident happened. The rural area includes dense layers of forest.
Police have also recovered the AR-15 allegedly used in the shooting, though law enforcement warned that Oropesa may be carrying another weapon.
San Jacinto County Sheriff Greg Capers said Saturday evening that authorities had widened the search to as far as 32 kilometres from the scene of the shooting but conceded that law enforcement have no idea where the suspect could be.
“He could be anywhere now,” Capers said.
More than 250 officers are currently searching for Oropesa.
“We’re running into dead ends,” said James Smith, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Houston-area office, at a news conference on Sunday. “Right now we have zero leads.”
According to Capers, the altercation began when Oropesa allegedly started shooting his AR-15 in his yard on Friday night.
The shooting took place on a rural pothole-riddled street where single-storey homes sit on wide one-acre lots and are surrounded by a thick canopy of trees. One resident noted that neighbours in the area often unwind by firing off guns.
One of Oropesa’s neighbours walked over to his fence and asked if he could stop shooting. Oropesa allegedly responded by saying it was his property.
“The man walked over to the fence, said, ‘Hey, we’re trying to keep the baby asleep in here,'” Capers said in the press conference.
Both parties then went back to their houses. Oropesa “topped off his magazine, and walked down his driveway” onto the street and then “into the people’s house and started shooting,” Capers alleged.
Five people in the home were killed, though Capers noted there were 10 people living in the house at the time, some of whom had just moved there earlier in the week. Four died at the scene, but the fifth, a nine-year-old boy, later died in hospital.
“All of them were headshot in an execution style,” he said.
FBI spokesperson Christina Garza said investigators do not believe everyone at the home was a member of a single family. The victims were identified as Sonia Argentina Guzman, 25; Diana Velazquez Alvarado, 21; Julisa Molina Rivera, 31; Jose Jonathan Casarez, 18; and Daniel Enrique Laso, 9.
Two of the victims were found in a bedroom lying on top of two children in an attempt to shield them, Capers said. In total, three children were recovered safe from the site of the mass shooting, “covered in blood” but uninjured.
Police believe 15 rounds were fired.
Rene Arevalo Sr., who lives a few houses down, said he heard gunshots around midnight but didn’t think anything of it.
“It’s a normal thing people do around here, especially on Fridays after work,” Arevalo said. “They get home and start drinking in their backyards and shooting out there.”
Capers said his deputies had been to Oropesa’s home at least once before and spoken with him about “shooting his gun in the yard.” It was not clear whether any action was taken at the time. At a news conference Saturday evening, the sheriff said firing a gun on your own property can be illegal, but he did not say whether Oropesa had previously broken the law.
Shawn Crawford, another resident of the area who said he knew Oropesa and the victims, described him as a “family guy.”
“He’s always working, training his horse,” Crawford told NBC News. “Never have I seen a fight, argument, raise his voice, anything.”
Crawford said when neighbours in the past had complaints about gunfire, Oropesa would just move to another side of his property.
A total of US$80,000 in reward money has been pledged for anyone who can provide information that leads to Oropesa’s arrest.
Mass shootings have become commonplace in the United States, with at least 176 so far in 2023, the most at this point in the year since at least 2016, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The non-profit group defines a mass shooting as any in which four or more people are wounded or killed, not including the shooter.
— With files from The Associated Press and Reuters
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