$80,000 bounty offered for information leading to location of Cleveland shooter who killed 5, including young children from Honduras

Authorities have offered an $80,000 bounty for any information leading to the location of this “monster,” as FBI Special Agent James Smith called it.

The 38-year-old gunman is suspected of opening fire Friday night into Saturday inside a home in Cleveland, near Houston, killing five people, all from Honduras and aged 9 at 31 years old.

Victims executed

Wilson Garcia, one of the survivors, lost his 9-year-old son and his wife, as well as “two other people who died protecting my 2-and-a-half-year-old daughter,” he said. “I have no words to describe what happened”, “it was horrible”, testified, deeply moved, the father who escaped through the window.

According to local authorities, the suspect was practicing shooting in his garden when neighbors, including Mr. Garcia, asked him to stop the noise so that a baby could sleep. In response, he walked into his neighbors’ house and shot “execution-like, basically in the head” of several residents, Sheriff Capers said.

Among the survivors, three children “covered in the blood of the women who had lain on them to protect them” were discovered and rescued, he added.

Weapons and immigration

This news item aroused strong emotion in the United States and in Honduras, a small country in Central America where the young victims were from.

On Sunday, Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott posted a tweet, condemned by his opponents, in which he called the victims “illegal immigrants”. But on Monday, Mr. Abbott’s office went back on his remarks, saying that “one of the victims may have legally resided in the United States”, according to a press release quoted by American media.

“Five human beings have lost their lives and Greg Abbott strives to qualify them as + illegal immigrants +”, was indignant on Twitter Julian Castro, ex-housing minister of Barack Obama and former mayor of the Texas city of San Antonio.

Entering the country illegally, the shooter Mr. Oropeza had already been deported from the United States to Mexico four times, according to a source within the immigration authorities quoted by CNN.

Honduran Foreign Minister Enrique Reina, for his part, demanded that the suspect be held accountable for his actions “according to all the rigor of the law”.