Man accused of killing 5 in Texas had help evading capture, officials say

HOUSTON – Officials said on Wednesday they had arrested the wife of the man they believe had

fatally shot five people in a neighbourhood dispute

outside Cleveland, Texas.

The arrest was one of several the authorities made after

locating and arresting the suspect on Tuesday.

The announcement pointed to assistance that the suspect, Francisco Oropesa, may have had from relatives and others who lived near his home in eluding capture for four days while a search stretched across Texas to the Mexican border.

The hunt ended on Tuesday when heavily armed state and federal officers found Oropesa, 38, in a house a few kilometres from the site in San Jacinto County where the shooting took place last Friday.

He was discovered “hiding in a closet underneath some laundry”, according to San Jacinto Sheriff Greg Capers.

On Wednesday, Mr Tim Kean, the chief deputy of the San Jacinto County Sheriff’s Office, said “several arrests” had been made in the case and more were expected.

Besides Oropesa, those arrested included a woman described as his wife, Divimara Nava.

During the search, officials said that Nava was cooperating with investigators.

But she was at the house in Montgomery County where Oropesa was found and arrested on Tuesday, and investigators now believe she assisted him in evading capture.

Nava, 52, appeared in court on Wednesday.

Prosecutors said during the hearing that she had granted officers access to the home where Oropesa was and that she had told them he arrived there only at around 1.30am local time on Tuesday, about 17 hours before his capture.

During her interview with police, according to prosecutors, Nava said that Oropesa had showered and slept and that she had fetched him doughnuts from a nearby store. Prosecutors also said she had passed a message from Oropesa to a cousin.

“The message from him was him requesting assistance to get him to Mexico,” a prosecutor said, reading from arrest paperwork; the cousin did not provide that assistance.

Oropesa and Nava lived together in the home next to where the shooting took place in San Jacinto County. Both are citizens of Mexico.

Nava has been charged with hindering the apprehension of a known felon, according to the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office, and is being held in Montgomery County.

“Anybody that helped this maniac has definitely got some kind of issues,” Mr Kean said.

He said that while Oropesa was on the run, he made use of a mobile phone to call several people who were not far from the house where he was eventually arrested. Officers found a different mobile phone belonging to Oropesa early in the search.

Mr Kean added that investigators did not believe that Oropesa had spent the whole four days of the search at the house where he was ultimately found, and that he probably was the person who was spotted near a landfill on Monday.

Although officers rushed to that location, Mr Kean said, they did not capture Oropesa at that point.

Oropesa,

who has been deported from the United States four times,

has been charged with five counts of murder and is being held on US$5 million (S$6.7 million) bond, Sheriff Capers said. On Tuesday night, Oropesa was transferred to a San Jacinto County jail.

The sheriff declined to say on Tuesday who owned the house where Oropesa was found, which is near the town of Cut and Shoot. Property records indicated that the house belonged to one of his relatives.

“Somebody got a tip,” he said in a Tuesday night news conference. Then tactical officers from several agencies “meandered over there and found that tip to be true”. Sheriff Capers said Oropesa did not resist arrest.

State and federal law enforcement officials had been searching for Oropesa in the thick forests around his home outside Cleveland, in neighbouring counties and as far south as the border with Mexico, where, officials believed, he might have been trying to flee.

But in the end, officers found Oropesa – whose face stared out from large Spanish-language posters around San Jacinto County, about an hour’s drive north of downtown Houston – roughly 16km from the scene of the killings.

Mr Jimmy Paul, an assistant special agent in charge with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said the tip that had led to the arrest came in at 5.15pm on Tuesday; Oropesa was arrested at 6.30pm.

Mr Paul did not elaborate on the nature of the tip or who had left it. Officials had offered rewards totalling US$80,000 for information leading to Oropesa’s arrest.

Officials said that late on Friday, Oropesa was firing a gun in his front yard outside Cleveland, on a plot of land smaller than an acre in a row of similarly sized properties along a rutted dirt road. His immediate neighbours, a family from Honduras, complained about the noise around 11.30pm, both to Oropesa and by calling 911.

Officers did not immediately go to the area, where residents have long complained of dangerously wanton gunfire. Soon after the complaints, officials said, Oropesa could be seen on a doorbell video entering his neighbour Wilson Garcia’s home, armed with an AR-15-style rifle.

Five people were fatally shot inside the home, according to the FBI: Garcia’s wife Sonia Guzman, 25; his son Daniel Enrique Laso, nine; Ms Diana Velazquez Alvarado, 21; Ms Juliza Molina Rivera, 31; and Mr Jose Jonathan Casarez, 18.

Officials declined to answer questions on Tuesday about the speed of the response to the killings.

The top official in San Jacinto County, Mr Fritz Faulkner, said in a telephone interview that he was alerted to the arrest shortly after it happened.

The killings shocked the community, he said, and the arrests meant the county was now, after several days, finally able to rest easy.

“I’m just elated,” Mr Faulkner said. NYTIMES