The man wanted by law enforcement for the killings of five Texas neighbors – including a 9-year-old boy – had entered the US illegally and been deported by immigration officials at least four times, a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement source said.
The suspect, identified by ICE as Francisco Oropesa Perez-Torres, was first removed by an immigration judge in March 2009, the ICE source told CNN on Monday.
“At an unknown time and location, Perez-Torres unlawfully reentered the United States, and was apprehended and removed several more times by ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations in September 2009, January 2012, and July 2016,” the source said.
Oropesa’s current immigration status is unclear, and it is not known how long he had been in the US since he was last deported.
Authorities are now pleading for the public’s help in their search for Oropesa, 38, who they say opened fire after he was asked to stop shooting his rifle near a neighboring family’s home in Cleveland, a city of about 8,000 people northeast of Houston.
Oropesa is considered armed and dangerous, an FBI official said, as more than 250 law enforcement officers and $80,000 in reward money have been devoted to capturing him. The massacre is among more than 180 US mass shootings in just the first four months of the year and, like others, seemingly stemmed from an ordinary encounter.
About 10 to 20 minutes before Friday’s massacre, Wilson Garcia and two other men had walked over to Oropesa’s yard to ask him to stop shooting so close to their home because their baby was sleeping, Garcia told CNN. They’d asked Oropesa to shoot on the other side of his property, he said.
The suspect refused, and Garcia said he would call police.
“We walked inside and my wife was talking to the police, and we called five times because he was being more threatening,” Garcia recalled.
“We saw him, he was leaving his property and cocked his gun,” the father said. “I told my wife to get inside because he cocked his gun and he might come threaten us. So my wife said, ‘You go inside, I don’t think he will fire at me because I’m a woman, I’ll stay here at the door.’”
The gunman later came to Garcia’s home, shooting his wife, Sonia Argentina Guzman, in the doorway before killing three other adults and Garcia’s son, Daniel Enrique Laso-Guzman, the grieving father said.
“One of the people who died saw when my wife fell to the ground,” Garcia told CNN.
“She told me to throw myself out 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 the window.”
The woman who helped Garcia flee 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 clothing so the murderer wouldn’t kill him, too. So just 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.
Before the deadly confrontation at Garcia’s home, five 911 calls had been made to report the gunman shooting his rifle outdoors, the father said.
Authorities got to the scene as fast as they could, Capers said. But his small force covers a large county, he said, and the home is about 15 minutes outside town.
The other victims have been identified as Diana Velázquez Alvarado, 21; Julisa Molina Rivera, 31, and José Jonathan Cás