Police in Texas arrest suspect in mass shooting
Massive manhunt ends a few miles from crime scene
CLEVELAND, Texas — The sound of gunfire — whether from hunting, or target practice, or celebration — is common in much of rural America. Perhaps nowhere is this more true than in Texas, where the occasional volley rarely raises alarm.
So when someone from an immigrant family from Honduras called 911 on Friday night to report that their next-door neighbor was shooting from his small property in San Jacinto County, the police did not rush to the scene. Officers did not arrive until after the neighbor had stormed into the family’s house and killed five people, including a 9-year-old boy and a 16-yearold girl, with his AR-15-style rifle.
On Tuesday, after an extensive search, officials in Texas said they had arrested the suspect, Francisco Oropesa, 38, a few miles from where the killings took place. But they were still struggling to understand why such aimless shooting, of the sort common in that part of Texas, had turned into a massacre.
More than 250 officers from a dozen agencies had been on the hunt for Oropesa, a Mexican immigrant who had been deported four times. Law enforcement officials had feared that he had been headed to Mexico, or had already arrived there.
The lack of a rapid police response to the family’s initial call for help, shortly after 11:30 p.m., raised questions about how to handle reports of gunfire in Texas, where the ownership of weapons has become less regulated.
Texas law affords broad leeway to people firing weapons in rural areas, preventing regulation by local counties on properties larger than 10 acres. Counties may explicitly bar shooting on smaller lots in subdivisions, but many have opted not to do so, relying instead on more general rules preventing recklessness or firing over property lines.
Officials in San Jacinto County said that was the law there, and it would have made shooting in the yard, of the kind the family had reported, illegal.
“I get calls all the time for that,” said Roy Rogers, a county constable in San Jacinto County. “I go down there and I check it out. If they’re discharging the weapon in a safe manner, there’s nothing I can do.”