Texas man fatally shoots five neighbors after noise complaint, sheriff says

After neighbors complained about the noise he was making, a Texas man went next door with an AR-15-style rifle and shot them, killing five people – including an eight-year-old child – as well as wounding three others at a home in Cleveland, Texas, on Friday night.

Law enforcement patrolling the community more than 40 miles outside of Houston were searching for Francisco Oropeza, 39, who had been intoxicated and fled the scene, the sheriff of San Jacinto county, Greg Capers, told reporters on Saturday.

Oropeza, who was still on the run as of Saturday morning, is facing five charges of murder, Capers told the Washington Post. He was believed to be within two miles of the scene of the shooting as the search for him continued.

Family members had walked to his fence and asked Oropeza to cease shooting rounds in his yard because an infant was trying to sleep.

Oropeza responded by saying that it was his property. Capers told reporters that video footage showed Oropeza walking up to the neighbors’ front door with the rifle.

The killing, less than a year after the deadliest mass shooting at a Texas public school left 19 students and two teachers dead in Uvalde, marked the 174th mass shooting and 17th mass killing in the United States so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

The archive defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more victims are killed or wounded. It defines a mass killing as one in which four or more victims are slain.

That puts the United States at a record pace of mass killings this year. Currently, mass killings happen once every six and a half days, according to an analysis by the Associated Press and USA Today.

Capers told reporters that the killings in Cleveland unfolded about 11.30pm local time. “Everyone that was shot was shot from the neck up, almost execution-style,” Capers said.

Of the 10 people in the house, four people were found dead at the scene. A fifth – the youngest victim at 8 years old – died later at the hospital. All of victims were from Honduras. Oropeza is from Mexico. Honduras’s foreign minister, Eduardo Enrique Reina, wrote in Spanish on Twitter that Oropeza should face the “full weight of the law” for the killings. The Spanish language newspaper Tu Nota first reported Reina’s tweet.

Capers noted that two women who were killed “were laying over these children were doing it in such an effort as to protect the child”. Those children survived.

“It’s horrific,” Capers told the Washington Post. “No one should ever have to look at this scene, the blood, the trauma that went on in that house.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.