After days of manhunt: suspected Texas shooter caught

The suspected Mexican was arrested Tuesday evening (local time) in Montgomery County, the local sheriff said. Several hundred police officers, squads of horsemen and sniffer dogs were involved in the four-day manhunt for the man in the Houston area.

The alleged perpetrator shot several neighbors in a residential building in the small town of Cleveland late Friday night. They had previously asked him to stop firing in his front yard so a baby could sleep. The drunk man refused the request – instead he showed up at the neighbors front door with his gun and started a veritable carnage. According to police, he killed his victims “almost execution-style” — with shots to the head or neck at close range.

The victims included a child and two women who appeared to have shielded two children from the shots with their bodies. According to the police, there were a total of ten people in the house, five of whom were unharmed. The five fatalities are from Honduras and, according to media reports, had moved a few days earlier from Houston to Cleveland, some 70 kilometers away.

Gun laws in the conservative state of Texas are particularly lax, even by American standards. The gun lobby, which is extraordinarily powerful in the US, pushes for the right to arm oneself despite numerous bloody crimes, knowing above all that the Republicans in Congress are on their side: they have long supported a substantial tightening of gun laws in the United States. Every year in the United States, tens of thousands of people die from gun violence. (sda/dpa)