At a vigil held for the dead Sunday, community members hugged one another and sang “Amazing Grace.” A man said he went to church on Sunday morning for the first time in a long while. A woman said her sense of safety, even inside her own home, is shattered. The massacre, which came after what should have been an innocuous exchange between neighbors, marked the seventh attack of its kind this month — gun violence sparked by seemingly everyday interactions. And the extensive manhunt for the suspect has so far yielded little.
“The longer this goes on, this will get harder,” James Smith, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Houston field office, said at a news conference Sunday afternoon. “We do not know where he is. . . . We’re running into dead ends. We have zero leads to him.”
Law enforcement officers initially searched for the suspect, Francisco Oropeza, 38, in a wooded area near the Cleveland neighborhood where the shooting occurred, but they eventually lost his trail. The FBI’s Houston office on Sunday warned anyone who might see Oropeza not to confront him because he was considered “armed and dangerous.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R), the FBI and other groups are collectively offering an $80,000 reward for information that leads to the suspect’s arrest.
President Biden was briefed Sunday morning on the search for the gunman, according to a White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. Biden has not commented directly on the shooting.
Oropeza “could be anywhere” within 10 to 20 square miles, Smith had said Saturday after authorities expanded their search area. Officials said that they found the AR-15-style weapon allegedly used in the killings, as well as articles of clothing and a cellphone, but that they were unsure whether the suspect had another gun with him.
The FBI’s Houston office said people can share tips about the suspect at 936-653-4367.
Oropeza faces five counts of murder in the killings of four adults and a 9-year-old child, San Jacinto County Sheriff Greg Capers said. Authorities said all five victims were shot in the head. Five other people survived the shooting in the small city about 45 miles northeast of downtown Houston.
During Sunday’s news conference, reporters questioned officials after the FBI’s Houston office released an incorrect image of the gunman. “It was a mistake,” Smith said.
“For an investigation like this, we’re receiving information from a whole slew of agencies,” he added. “We acted quickly to remove that photo. We’re 100 percent confident we now have the right photo out there.”
Capers, the San Jacinto County sheriff, told media that officials are in “constant contact” with the alleged gunman’s wife.
At least three physically unharmed children were found at the crime scene Friday night and put in an ambulance, Capers said. Two of the women who were killed were found lying on top of the surviving young children in a bedroom, according to authorities.
“They were covered in blood from the same ladies who were laying on top of them, trying to protect them,” Capers added. The children “are now safe and with family.”
The killings marked at least the seventh incident this month in which an armed American shot others in response to otherwise unremarkable encounters. Among them, an 84-year-old man allegedly shot a teenager who accidentally knocked on the wrong door in Kansas City. In Upstate New York, a man allegedly killed a 20-year-old woman who was in a car that mistakenly pulled into his driveway. And in South Florida, someone shot a delivery driver and his girlfriend when they came to the wrong address.
Oropeza was firing his weapon in his yard Friday about 11 p.m. when his neighbors asked him to stop, noting that their baby was trying to sleep, officials said. Rather than ceasing, Oropeza allegedly became angry, took the gun inside the neighbors’ home and killed half the people there.
The victims were identified Saturday as Sonia Argentina Guzmán, 25; Diana Velazquez Alvarado, 21; Julisa Molina Rivera, 31; Jose Jonathan Casarez, 18; and Daniel Enrique Laso, 9. All were from Honduras, authorities said.
Gunfire rings out often in the rural community of San Jacinto, residents said.
“Your heart knows not to race so much when you hear it,” Juanis Renovato, a local resident, told The Washington Post. “Those are mostly men trying to show off their power.”
It doesn’t usually end in tragedy, she added in an interview conducted in Spanish.
“This was just incredibly shocking,” Renovato said. “To think my children are students in the same school as one of the victims; to think we could’ve had similar life circumstances — it’s tragic.”
“It shows it can happen to anyone, and [after] doing something as common as asking a neighbor to stop the noise,” she added.
Dozens of families, teachers and community members huddled at the front entrance of Northside Elementary School during a vigil Sunday. It was a farewell to Daniel, the 9-year-old killed in the shooting. The third-grader had a passion for sports, always wore a smile and loved helping out his mother with his younger siblings, said his aunt, Lucía Guzmán. Daniel’s mother, Sonia Guzmán, was also killed in the shooting.
“He was the most beloved kid ever,” Lucía said in Spanish. “And his heart knew no bounds.”
The family is trying to raise funds to take their bodies to Honduras to be buried. “Home will be their resting place,” Lucía Guzmán said, standing next to a flagpole surrounded by dozens of roses, sunflowers and balloons splashed with “Paw Patrol” cartoons.
Despite the ongoing manhunt, schools in Cleveland Independent School District, which has nearly 12,000 students, planned to open Monday. Crisis counselors would be ready to aid grieving students and staff members, Schools Superintendent Stephen McCanless said.
The school district has established stricter security protocols in response to the gun violence gripping the nation, he said.
“And we will keep adding them, because can you ever get to the point where you’re completely secure?” McCanless said. “I don’t know if anybody can ever say that, but I’ll guarantee you this: We’re working hard every day to ensure security throughout our district and to make sure our students and staff and parents feel secure.”
The shooting sent shock waves of fear and grief throughout a district that McCanless described as “tightknit and family-oriented.” Isabella Rodriguez, 18, said her 7-year-old cousin, who lives just a couple of blocks away from the crime scene, was friends with Daniel, and the boys would often ride the school bus together.
“He heard the gunshots, and he’s been crying since then,” Rodriguez said. “He’s asking if he and his family are going to die.”
At the same time, a flood of support has also arrived as a sign of hope. On Sunday evening, vigil attendees prayed in Spanish and English, clasping their hands together and offering one another hugs. At the end, the group sang “Amazing Grace.”
“We’re going through a tragedy right now, but Cleveland is close-knit,” McCanless said. “We might never know what brought this pain, but we’re going to get through it and we’ll come out on the other side even stronger.”
Vianey Balderas, who lives across the street from the family, said her terror prevented her from sleeping most of Friday night.
“I am now afraid to be at home,” Balderas, 27, said in Spanish. “This shatters the sense of safety of being in your own home, especially because they are neighbors whom I see every day.”
Capers, the sheriff, told reporters Saturday that it could be considered illegal for someone to fire a weapon in their yard in a subdivision like the one where the shooting occurred, but he stopped short of saying that Oropeza had broken the law in that regard.
On Sunday morning, with the shooter still at large, scores of families packed into Cleveland’s Saint Mary’s Church, seeking comfort and kinship after a tragedy threw a spotlight onto their rural community of some 8,000 residents.
Carlos Rivera had been meaning to go to church for a while, but “life has a way of getting between us” and the Spanish Mass at noon, he told The Post. Hearing about the shooting on Saturday, however, moved him to head to church with his 5-year-old son, Joshua, and 13-year-old daughter, Génesis.
“What happened in our town has turned us into national and international news,” Father Andy Vu said during his homily in Spanish. “We have to be good shepherds for the sake of families and town.”
In a nearby booth, as Vu narrated the events from Friday night, a child whispered to his father: “Do you think they’re going to heaven?”
“My little son, let’s pray they do,” the child’s father said.
Iati, Javaid and Kaur reported from Washington. Mark Berman, Justine McDaniel, Toluse Olorunnipa, Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff and Andrea Salcedo in Washington contributed to this report.
A previous version of this article incorrectly said that Daniel Enrique Laso was 8 years old based on statements from law enforcement officials. His family later clarified that Daniel had turned 9 in February. The article has been corrected.