Texas mass shooting: Accused killer caught after manhunt

The man accused of killing five of his neighbours, including a child, has been captured after being on the run for days. See the video.

The man accused of killing five of his neighbours — including an eight-year-old boy — in Texas has been arrested and taken into custody after being captured by police.

Francisco Oropeza, 38, allegedly stormed into a crowded house in San Jacinto County last week and opened fire after a request to stop firing his semi-automatic weapon in his own yard because it was keeping a baby awake.

Authorities said a tip led to Oropeza’s capture and he is now in custody in the Montgomery County Jail.

He was found at a location where they had previously searched, police said.

The accused killer is taken into custody.

Earlier, it revealed Oropeza was a Mexican national who had apparently been deported four times.

According to sources that spoke to ABC News US, Oropeza was first deported in March 2009 and then again in September 2009, January 2012 after he was convicted in Montgomery County for driving while intoxicated.

He was last deported in July 2016, and it remains unclear what his current immigration status is or when he came back into the country, the news outlet reported.

Francisco Oropeza allegedly went on a gun rampage.

The victims were Sonia Argentina Gúzman, 25; Diana Velázquez Alvarado, 21; Julisa Molina Rivera, 31; José Jonathan Cásarez, 18; and Daniel Enrique Laso-Guzman, 8.

Investigators initially began tracking Oropeza using his mobile phone, but say the trail went cold Saturday evening.

“He could be anywhere now,” Sheriff Greg Capers of San Jacinto County, which is north of Houston, said in a Saturday news conference.

Mr Capers described a horrifying scene when authorities went to the residence after receiving a call about “harassment” around 11.30pm on Friday (local time).

Victim Sonia Argentina Gúzman, aged 25.

The youngest victim Daniel Enrique Laso-Guzman, aged 8.

The victims, aged from eight to 40, were strewn from the front door through the house to an inside bedroom, where two of them – both women – were found lying on top of two traumatised children who survived the massacre.

“In my opinion, they were actually trying to take care of the babies and keep them babies alive,” Mr Capers told ABC’s Houston station KTRK.

José Jonathan Cásarez, aged 18, was also shot dead.

Mr Capers also said one person inside the residence captured a video of Oropeza walking up to their front door with the rifle.

All the victims had been shot “from the neck up, almost execution style, basically in the head,” Mr Capers added.

Deputies found “several others in critical condition from multiple gunshot wounds,” the sheriff’s office said in a Facebook post. Three were hospitalised.

Officers at the scene of the horrific shooting. Picture: Getty Images

The gunman has not been found. Picture: Getty Images

The suspect “had been drinking, and he says, ‘I’ll do what I want to in my front yard,’” the sheriff told KTRK.

“All the victims were from Honduras,” Mr Capers told reporters, adding that 10 people had been in the house at the time.

The Honduran foreign minister, Enrique Reina, called for the gunman to face “the full weight of the law.” He said officials would follow the case closely.

An arrest warrant and a $US5 million ($A7.5 million) bond have been issued for Oropeza.

HOW SIMPLE MISTAKES END IN GUNFIRE

Run, hide, fight.

American children know those three words well. Growing up in a country where guns are the leading cause of their death, that is how they are taught to defend themselves.

Ralph Yarl would not have been thinking about his active shooter training when he rang the wrong Missouri doorbell to pick up his little brothers.

Nor would Heather Roth when she got into the wrong car after cheerleading training in Texas.

And nor would Kaylin Gillis when she and her friends pulled into the wrong New York driveway in search of a friend’s party.

But before they could run, hide or fight, Yarl, Roth and Gillies’s innocuous mistakes were met almost instantly with gunfire.

Ralph Yarl, 16, went to the wrong house while going to pick up his twin brothers.

Yarl, 16, was shot in the head and barely survived. A bullet grazed Roth, 21, while her 18-year-old teammate Payton Washington was hit in the leg and back and had to have her spleen removed. Gillies, 20, was struck in the neck and died in the arms of her boyfriend.

These three shootings, in the space of six days this month, represent the latest frightening strain of the American gun violence epidemic.

Kaylin Gillies was killed in upstate New York

More than 13,500 people have been killed by a firearm in the US this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which is the equivalent of 116 gun-related deaths a day.

The number of mass shootings – from a Nashville school and a Monterey Park dance hall to a Half Moon Bay farm and a Dadeville birthday party – is on track to be higher than ever.

And yet, it is the sheer senselessness of what happened in Missouri, Texas and New York that has reignited the gun debate in a country that can otherwise often seem ignorant of or even immune to these horrific figures.

Ralph Yarl, 16, went to the wrong house while going to pick up his twin brothers.

On April 13, Yarl’s mother sent him to collect his brothers from 1100 NE 115th Terrace in Kansas City. But the doorbell he rang was a block away at 1100 NE 115th Street, where 84-year-old Andrew Lester had just climbed into bed.

Lester later told police he picked up his gun and fired twice within seconds of opening his door because he was “scared to death” of the Black teen he claimed was trying to break in.

According to Yarl, a skinny clarinet player, no words were exchanged until after he was hit in the head and arm. As he scrambled to find help, Lester yelled: “Don’t come around here.”

The booking photo of Andrew Lester, who has been charged in the shooting of Ralph Yarl. Picture: Clay County Missouri Sheriff's Office / AFP

On April 15, in the farming town of Hebron, two carloads of friends turned into the wrong driveway as they tried to find a party without any phone reception.

“As soon as we figured it out that we were at the wrong location, we started to leave, and that’s when everything happened,” 19-year-old Brian Walsh said.

Homeowner Kevin Monahan, 65, opened fire and hit Walsh’s high school sweetheart Gillies. The cars sped off but she died before they could call for help.

Hebron supervisor Brian Campbell said it was not unusual in the “quiet and tranquil town” for motorists to wake him up needing directions, petrol or help pulling their vehicle out of a ditch.

“I can’t even fathom what would make a person shoot at a car that was in their driveway,” he said.

Texas cheerleaders Payton Washington and Heather Roth (Pictured) were both shot and wounded when they got in the wrong car in a parking lot on the way home from practice

Then on April 18, Roth climbed into what she thought was her car in an Austin supermarket parking lot, which she and her teammates used to carpool to and from cheerleading practice.

When she saw 25-year-old Pedro Tello Rodriguez in the passenger seat, she retreated to her friend’s car and apologised when he approached them.

“Then he pulled out a gun and he just started shooting at all of us,” Roth said.

“Nobody deserves anything like this.”

Cheerleader Payton Washington who was shot in Austin, Texas. Instagram

Taken together, the shootings show assault weapon bans, background checks and safe storage rules – the top priorities to stop gun violence – will not cure the gun epidemic alone.

A recent analysis by the RAND Corporation think tank shows “stand your ground” laws which permit deadly force in self-defence have likely increased firearm homicide rates.

Wake Forest University gun culture expert David Yamane warns the statutes in place across at least 28 states “unintentionally mislead people into thinking that self-defence laws truly give them a blanket licence to kill with impunity”.

Pedro Tello Rodriguez Jr was arrested after two Texas cheerleaders were shot on Tuesday, April 17, 2023. Picture: Elgin Police Department/Facebook

Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, who represents the state where the handgun was invented, points to an even more pernicious problem.

“We just need to ask some deeper questions about why people in America are just so unhappy and so alone that they would resort to violence this regularly and this casually,” he told Congress last week.

“We are becoming a heavily-armed nation so fearful and angry and hair-trigger anxious that gun murders are now just the way in which we work out our frustrations.”

“This is a dystopia, and I’m here to tell you that it’s a dystopia that we’ve chosen for ourselves.”