A man accused of killing five of his neighbors in the state of Texas after being confronted for making too much noise with his assault rifle in his yard had been deported four times since 2009, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said Monday USA.
The suspect in the attack in the rural Cleveland, Texas community, Francisco Oropesa, 38, is a Mexican man who was deported in March 2009 after an immigration judge ordered his removal, ICE said in a statement.
He was detained and deported again in September 2009, January 2012 and July 2016, ICE said. Oropesa was convicted of driving while intoxicated in January 2012 in Montgomery County, also in Texas, and sentenced to prison, ICE added.
Police had not released any further information to the media on the progress of their search until Monday afternoon, but the trail had apparently gone cold on Sunday.
“We don’t know where he is,” Houston FBI Special Agent in Charge James Smith told reporters on Sunday. “Right now, we have zero leads.”
Officers went door-to-door in a search that involved more than 250 officers from a dozen agencies, San Jacinto County Sheriff Greg Capers said. Authorities are offering an $80,000 reward for information leading to the suspect’s arrest.
Capers said Saturday that the suspect left his home Friday night and began firing an AR-15-style rifle on his front lawn. That’s when the residents of Cleveland, located about 45 miles north of Houston, asked him to stop because the shots were keeping a baby awake.
Capers said police recovered the weapon used in the shooting, but the suspect may have been armed with a handgun. Police also recovered other weapons at the attacker’s home, as well as a cell phone.
One attack survivor, Wilson Garcia, who is the father of the one-month-old baby, told KTRT Houstona subsidiary of ABC Newswho escaped through a window after several shots nearly hit him.
“We asked her to be quiet” because the noise was scaring the baby, she told KTRT.
Instead of stopping, the suspect broke into his neighbors’ house with his rifle and began shooting.
The victims were identified as Sonia Argentina Guzmán, 25 years old; Diana Velazquez Alvarado, 21; Julisa Molina Rivera, 31; Jose Jonathan Casarez, 18; and Daniel Enrique Laso, 8 years old. It is believed that all resided in the house, but were not members of a single family, according to the FBI.
Shootings have become frequent in the United States, with at least 176 incidents so far in 2023, the highest number for this time of year since at least 2016, according to Gun Violence Archive. The nonprofit group defines an armed attack as any shooting in which four or more people are injured or killed, not including the assailant.
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