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Texas man fatally shoots five neighbors after noise complaint, sheriff says
Five people killed in south-east Texas shooting
(32 minutes later)
Police are searching for suspect in after shooting in Cleveland, in which one of the victims was an eight-year-old child
Four pronounced dead at Cleveland house and fifth died in hospital, sheriff’s office says
After neighbors complained about the noise he was making, a Texas man went next door with an AR-15-style rifle and shot them, killing five people – including an eight-year-old child – as well as wounding three others at a home in Cleveland, Texas, on Friday night.
Five people including an eight-year-old child have been killed in a shooting at a home in Cleveland, Texas, ABC News reported
Law enforcement patrolling the community more than 40 miles outside of Houston were searching for Francisco Oropeza, 38, who had been intoxicated and fled the scene, the sheriff of San Jacinto county, Greg Capers, told reporters on Saturday.
The shooting took place late on Friday and the police were still looking for the suspect, it cited local police and authorities as saying.
Oropeza is facing five charges of murder, Capers told the Washington Post. By Saturday afternoon, as police continued to search for his whereabouts, Capers reportedly told local media that authorities believed they had cornered Oropeza in a wooded area.
Officials from the San Jacinto County sheriff’s office received a call about harassment at around 11.31pm local time.
Family members had walked to his fence and asked Oropeza to cease shooting rounds in his yard because an infant was trying to sleep.
The office told ABC that the suspect was a Mexican man who was intoxicated, armed and on the run.
Oropeza responded by saying that it was his property. Capers told reporters that video footage showed Oropeza walking up to the neighbors’ front door with the rifle.
The Cleveland police department did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for a comment, and the San Jacinto County sheriff’s office could not be reached.
The killing, less than a year after the deadliest mass shooting at a Texas public school left 19 students and two teachers dead in Uvalde, marked the 174th mass shooting and 17th mass killing in the United States so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
The police did not disclose the identity of the victims or their possible relationship to the suspect, but said that they were all from Honduras, the ABC report said.
The archive defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more victims are killed or wounded. It defines a mass killing as one in which four or more victims are slain.
The shootings took place in one home. Four victims were declared dead at the scene and the fifth died later in hospital.
That puts the United States at a record pace of mass killings this year. Currently, mass killings happen once every six and a half days, according to an analysis by the Associated Press and USA Today.
The youngest victim was eight. Two female victims were found on top of two surviving children, the report cited authorities as saying.
Capers told reporters that the killings in Cleveland unfolded about 11.30pm local time. “Everyone that was shot was shot from the neck up, almost execution-style,” Capers said.
Of the 10 people in the house, four people were found dead at the scene. A fifth – the youngest victim at 8 years old – died later at the hospital. All of victims were from Honduras. Oropeza is from Mexico. Honduras’s foreign minister, Eduardo Enrique Reina, wrote in Spanish on Twitter that Oropeza should face the “full weight of the law” for the killings. The Spanish language newspaper Tu Nota first reported Reina’s tweet.
2/2 Exigimos se aplique todo el peso de la ley contra el o los responsables de este crimen.
Capers noted that two women who were killed “were laying over these children were doing it in such an effort as to protect the child”. Those children survived.
“It’s horrific,” Capers told the Washington Post. “No one should ever have to look at this scene, the blood, the trauma that went on in that house.”
