Authorities in Texas conducted an intense manhunt Monday to find a gunman suspected of killing five people, including an 8-year-old, who had simply complained about the sound of his assault rifle.
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More than 200 local and federal police were searching for the suspect, a Mexican identified as Francisco Oropeza, in this southern state where firearms abound.
Considered armed and dangerous, “he could be anywhere,” Mayor Greg Capers, who is in charge of the investigation, warned over the weekend during a press conference.
Authorities offered an $80,000 reward for any information leading to the location of this “monster,” as FBI Special Agent James Smith called it.
The 38-year-old gunman is suspected of opening fire Friday night into Saturday night inside a Cleveland home near Houston, killing five people, all Hondurans, aged 8 and a 31-year-old.
According to local authorities, he was practicing shooting in his garden when neighbors asked him to turn off the noise so a baby could sleep.
In response, the suspect allegedly entered his neighbours’ home and shot several residents “lynching-like, basically”.
This news aroused strong emotion in the United States and Honduras, a small Central American country where the youngest victims were.
And the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, published a tweet, which was denounced by his opponents, in which he described the victims as “illegal immigrants.”
This elected official, who is highly critical of President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration on immigration issues, has stirred up another controversy in recent months by bussing immigrants who entered illegally into Democratic strongholds in the United States.
The United States has more personal weapons than people, and they cause more than 130 deaths per day, more than half of which are suicides.
