By PAUL J. WEBER and JUAN A. LOZANO
CLEVELAND, Texas — A man went next door with a rifle and began shooting his neighbors, killing an 8-year-old and four others inside a house near Houston, after the family asked him to stop firing rounds in his yard because they were trying to sleep, authorities said Saturday.
San Jacinto County Sheriff Greg Capers said authorities were still searching for 38-year-old Francisco Oropeza following the shooting in the town of Cleveland, about 45 miles north of Houston. He said Oropeza used an AR-style rifle in the attack, which happened shortly before midnight Friday.
“All of his rounds were from the neck up, so basically in the head,” Capers told The Associated Press.
The attack was the latest act of gun violence in what has been a record pace of mass shootings in the U.S. so far this year, some of which have also involved semiautomatic rifles.
The mass killings have played out in a variety of places — a Nashville school, a Kentucky bank, a Southern California dance hall, and now a rural Texas neighborhood inside a single-story home.
By late Saturday morning, Capers said authorities were using scent-tracking dogs and an overhead drone in the search for Oropeza, who they believe was intoxicated at the time of the shooting and then fled toward a heavily wooded forest a few miles from the scene.
Capers said there were 10 people in the house — some of whom has just moved there earlier in the week — but that that no one else was injured. He said two of the victims, all believed to be from Honduras, were found laying over two children in a bedroom.
Two other victims, a male and female, were found by the front door and the slain child was in the front room. Capers said three other “blood-covered” children were found in the home and taken to a hospital, where they were determined to be uninjured.
“The Honduran ladies that were laying over these children were doing it in such an effort as to protect the child,”…
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