Francisco Oropeza's Wife Arrested After Suspected Gunman Found in Closet
The wife of a man suspected of killing five of his neighbors in a Texas shooting has been taken into custody, a day after he was arrested after being found hiding in a closet.
Francisco Oropeza's wife Divimara Lamar Nava, 52, was booked into the Montgomery County jail on a felony charge of hindering the apprehension or prosecution of a known felon, online jail records show. According to the records, she was arrested at a home on Summer Hollow Drive in Cut and Shoot, Texas, by state police. A bond is not listed.
A four-day manhunt for Oropeza, 38, ended when authorities took him into custody without incident after he was found hiding underneath a pile of laundry in the closet of a house in Cut and Shoot.
Montgomery County Sheriff Rand Henderson told the Associated Press that Nava had previously denied knowledge of Oropeza's whereabouts, but authorities believe she hid him in the home near Conroe where he was arrested.
Authorities have not said who owned that house or if anyone else was inside when he was found. A spokesperson for the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office told Newsweek that the agency has no further details it can release about the arrests of Nava and Oropeza. Newsweek has contacted the FBI and San Jacinto County Sheriff Greg Capers for comment via email.
The area where the arrests took place is about 20 miles from his home in rural Cleveland, where the shooting occurred late on Friday night.
Authorities said Oropeza went next door and shot his neighbors with an AR-style rifle after they had asked him to move farther away from their home because he was firing off rounds on his property and the gunfire was keeping a baby awake.
The tip that led to Oropeza's capture came in at 5:15 p.m. on Tuesday and he was arrested around 90 minutes later.
Capers said Oropeza will be charged with five counts of murder. His bond was set at $5 million.
The families of the victims "can rest easy now, because he is behind bars," Capers said. "And he will live out his life behind bars for killing those five."
Oropeza is a Mexican national who had been deported four times between 2009 and 2016. Capers said deputies had been called to his house at least one other time over the shooting of rounds in his yard.
The victims, who were all from Honduras, were identified as Diana Velazquez Alvarado, 21; Julisa Molina Rivera, 31; Jose Jonathan Casarez, 18; Sonia Argentina Guzman, 25; and Daniel Enrique Laso, 9.
Wilson Garcia, who survived the shooting but lost his wife and son, said two women in the home died while shielding his baby and two-year-old daughter.
One of the women told him to jump out a window "because my children were without a mother and one of their parents had to stay alive to take care of them," he said, according to the AP.
Over the weekend, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott prompted a backlash after he referred to the victims as "illegal immigrants" in his first public statement about the shooting.
His office later walked back the statement and apologized after receiving criticism for drawing attention to their immigration status. One of the victims was a permanent resident of the U.S., her husband said.
"We've since learned that at least one of the victims may have been in the United States legally," Abbott's spokesperson Renae Eze said in a statement to Newsweek. "We regret if the information was incorrect and detracted from the important goal of finding and arresting the criminal."
