Gunman kills five people in Texas home, authorities say

The loud, rapid-fire bangs from a gun were keeping Wilson Garcia's baby awake Friday night, so he asked the neighbor who was shooting if he could stop.

Authorities said the neighbor, Francisco Oropeza, 38, who had been drinking, said no. His yard, he said, his rules.

Garcia warned that he would call the police. But after Oropeza walked back to his house, he reemerged, with a gun.


He walked toward Garcia's home, where he shot Garcia's wife, Sonia Guzman Taibo, who was standing near the entrance and had called the police.

The rampage continued inside Garcia's home, where authorities said Oropeza fatally shot four additional people, including a 15-year-old girl and an 8-year-old boy, "almost execution-style."

"He wanted to kill us all to leave no evidence," Garcia said.

Friday night's shooting prompted a sprawling search for the gunman, who may have fled the area and remained at large as of Saturday evening.

Three other people were taken to hospitals after the shooting, which happened around 11:30 p.m. about 45 miles northeast of Houston. Their conditions were not immediately known. The victims were all from Honduras, officials said.

Four people were pronounced dead at the scene and a fifth person died at a hospital, the San Jacinto County Sheriff's Office said.

In addition to the girl and the boy who were killed, two of the victims were women and the fifth was a man. The identities of the victims have not yet been made public.

Several law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, were searching homes and wooded areas on foot and with drones to find Oropeza, San Jacinto County Sheriff Greg Capers said Saturday.

He said investigators believed that Oropeza had been drinking and firing shots in his yard when the victims walked over to ask him to stop. "He said, 'I'll do what I want to in my front yard,'" Capers said.

Garcia said that after Oropeza shot his wife, the gunman chased him. Garcia escaped through a window. "But after he couldn't catch me, he went back to the house to finish them off," he said.

According to Carlos Ramirez, Garcia's brother, the two women who were killed were shielding an 18-month-old boy and a 3-year-old girl, who survived.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.