• A man kills five people in Texas with a rifle when they ask him to stop shooting because it is night and they want to sleep

Francisco Oropesa Perez-Torres, the man who murdered five people in cold blood Friday in his Cleveland, Ohio, neighborhood, entered the U.S. illegally several times and was deported four times, according to U.S. Immigration Department data. It's unknown if he currently had his paperwork in order in Texas before he fled. More than 200 officers are searching for the shooter, who disappeared from the scene after killing four adults and a 9-year-old boy with shots at close range and above the neck, according to the police report.

The reward is $80,000 for any information leading to the arrest of Oropesa, who was deported in March 2009 for the first time. Subsequently expelled from the country in September 2009, January 2012 and July 2016, a 38-year-old Mexican man who was asked by his neighbors not to fire his rifle so close as he was trying to put his young son to sleep.

Far from paying attention, Oropesa entered his neighbor's house and caused the massacre, the umpteenth so far this year in the United States. According to data from the Gun Violence Archive, 248 people have lost their lives in 2023 in 184 shootings. About 10 to 20 minutes before the shooting, Wilson Garcia and two other men approached the shooter's home to convince him not to make so much noise with his gun, but he refused.

Shortly after, he left armed in the direction of the Garcia home. "We went in and my wife was talking to the police. We called five times because he was being more and more aggressive," Garcia explained. "We saw him, he was coming out of his property and loaded his gun," he said. "I told my wife to come in because she could come and threaten us. Then my wife said, 'Pass inside. I don't think he shoots me because I'm a woman. I'm staying here at the door.'"

The house where the massacre took place. David J. PhillipAP

Oropesa had no compassion for the woman, whom he shot in the head, or for the children inside the house. Two of the women killed died protecting two of Garcia's children, a two-and-a-half-year-old girl and a one-month-old baby. Otherwise, they may no longer be alive. Police officers have described it as an execution-style massacre.

One of the deceased women told Garcia to jump out of the window to flee, that the children could not be left without a father after losing their mother. "She's the person who helped me jump out of the window," Garcia later testified.

Oropesa's whereabouts remained unknown Monday afternoon, after authorities confirmed Sunday that they had no lead to follow. "We don't know where he is," said the FBI agent in charge of the investigation, James Smith. "Right now we have zero leads." The search is going door-to-door around the rural town of 8,000, about 80 miles north of Houston, with the suspicion that the killer has fled to Mexico.

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