Cleveland, Texas
CNN
—
The man accused of shooting five people, including a mother and her 9-year-old son, at a Texas home has been arrested after a daylong manhunt, two law enforcement sources told CNN .
The arrest was made in Cut and Shoot, Texas, according to a federal law enforcement source. Cut and Shoot is approximately 17 miles west of Cleveland, Texas, where the murders occurred.
Francisco Oropesa, 38, is accused of carrying out the massacre Friday night after neighbors asked him to stop firing his rifle so close to his home, authorities said. Investigators had initially started tracking Oropesa on his cell phone, but said the trail went cold Saturday evening and they have had no information on his whereabouts since then.
For days, authorities urged the public to come forward with any information and devoted substantial resources to locating the suspect, including more than 250 law enforcement officers and $80,000 in rewards for tips leading to his arrest. Billboards in Spanish advertise the reward money, authorities said, and the U.S. government is communicating the reward to media outlets across Mexico in case Oropesa is there, the law enforcement source told CNN on Monday.
Although Oropesa’s current immigration status is unknown, he had entered the United States illegally and been deported by immigration officials at least four times since 2009, said an ICE source who identified him as Francisco Oropesa Pérez-Torres. An immigration judge first removed him in March 2009 before he was deported again in September 2009, January 2012 and July 2016, the source said.
It is not known how long Oropesa has been in the US since his last deportation, according to the source.
The victims, all of Honduran nationality, have been identified as Sonia Argentina Guzman, 25 years old, and her son Daniel Enrique Laso-Guzman, 9 years old; Diana Velazquez Alvarado, 21; Julisa Molina Rivera, 31 years old, and Jose Jonathan Casarez,
Fifteen people, including friends and godparents who had come to help prepare for a church event, had gathered Friday at the home in Cleveland, a city of about 8,000 people northeast of Houston. said Wilson Garcia, whose wife and son were killed.
About 10 to 20 minutes before the massacre, Garcia and two others had approached Orpesa’s yard to ask him to stop shooting so close to his home because Garcia’s baby was sleeping, he told CNN. Orpesa had been asked to shoot across their property, the father said.
The suspect refused and Garcia said he would call the police.
“We went in and my wife was talking to the police, and we called five times because he was more threatening,” Garcia recalled.
“We saw him, he was coming off his property and he cocked his gun,” the father said. “I told my wife to come in because he cocked his gun and he might come and threaten us. So my wife said, ‘Go inside, I don’t think he’s going to shoot me because I’m a woman, I’ll stay here in the door'”.
Soon after, the gunman stormed Garcia’s home, first shooting his wife, Sonia Argentina Guzman, at the door before killing three other adults and Garcia’s son, Daniel Enrique Laso-Guzman, said the grieving father.
“One of the people who died saw my wife fall to the ground,” Garcia told CNN.
“He told me that you are throwing me out of the window because my children were already without a mother. So one of us had to stay alive to take care of them. She was the person who helped me jump out of the window.”
The woman who helped Garcia escape did not survive, he said.
“Two people who died were protecting my 2 1/2-year-old daughter and my 1-month-old son,” Garcia said, sobbing. “They protected him with a bunch of clothes so the killer wouldn’t kill him too. So imagine what we’re feeling now. It was horrible.”
When police arrived, they found the victims had been shot “almost execution-style” at close range above the neck, San Jacinto County Sheriff Greg Capers told local media.
Authorities arrived at the scene as quickly as they could, Capers said. But his small force covers a large county, he said, and the house is about 15 minutes outside the city.
As the victim’s families wept, Argentina Guzmán’s loved ones struggled to put their grief into words.
The pain his brother, German Guzman, is feeling is “unexplainable,” he told CNN, adding: “It’s hard to know that people who are very close to you are gone, very hard.”
“I feel like a part of me has gone with her. I feel like a part of my heart is broken,” said her mother, Francia Guzman.
“With God’s permission, he will come back in a coffin so he can say goodbye to me even if he never answers, even though he can’t say anything to me anymore,” said the mother.
Honduran officials are preparing to repatriate the victims’ remains, they said.
“The Honduran government deeply regrets the loss of these precious lives and accompanies all their loved ones in their grief. We demand that the competent authorities arrest the author of this terrible event and apply the full weight of the law,” the Honduran Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.
“All I want is for them to be brought back so they can rest where they were born, so they can rest forever and be in a place where I can at least bring them a flower,” said Francia Guzman.
