A convicted murderer on the run since escaping a prison bus after stabbing its driver last month was shot dead late Thursday after he killed a family of five and stole their truck from a rural weekend cabin, a Texas prison system spokesman said.
Gonzalo Lopez, 46, was killed about 10:30 p.m. Thursday in Jourdanton, Texas, about 35 miles (55 kilometers) south of San Antonio, said Jason Clark, spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
“Law enforcement in Atascosa County located the stolen vehicle, disabled it with spike strips, and gunfire ensued,” Clark said in a statement. No officers were injured, he said.
Lopez was killed about 220 miles (354 kilometers) southeast of Centerville, Texas, where Clark earlier said Lopez had killed a Houston family of five at their cabin and stole their pickup truck.
Lopez was thought to be hiding in the vicinity of the cabin when officers received a call from someone concerned after not hearing from an elderly relative, Clark said.
Officers went to the family’s cabin along Texas Route 7 west of Centerville about 6 p.m. Thursday and found the bodies of one adult and four minors, three of them children. Identities were not released, but gone was their white pickup truck, Clark said. Lopez was believed to have driven the truck from the search area, he said. Lopez was a former member of the Mexican Mafia prison gang and had ties to South Texas, he said.
The family was thought to have arrived Thursday morning at the cabin, which they owned, Clark said. The five are believed to have been killed Thursday afternoon and had no link to Lopez, he said.
Lopez, 46, had been the subject of an intensive search since his escape from the prison bus. He was being transported in a caged area of the bus from a prison in Gatesville, more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) west of the place where he escaped, to one in Huntsville for a medical appointment when he escaped in Leon County, a rural area between Dallas and Houston, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice has said.
Centerville is the county seat of Leon County, which has roughly 16,000 residents and is about 50 miles (80 kilometers) north of the state’s Huntsville prison headquarters.
The department has said Lopez somehow freed himself from his hand and leg restraints, cut through the expanded metal of the cage and crawled from the bottom. He then attacked the driver, who stopped the bus and got into an altercation with Lopez, and they both eventually got off the bus.
A second officer at the rear of the bus then exited and approached Lopez, who got back on the bus and started driving down the road, the department said.
The officers fired at Lopez and disabled the bus by shooting the rear tire, the department said. The bus then traveled a short distance before leaving the roadway, where Lopez got out and ran into the woods.
At some point during the escape, Lopez stabbed the driver, whose wounds weren’t life-threatening, the department said.
Lopez was serving a life prison sentence for a 2006 conviction of murdering a man along the Texas-Mexico border.
Police fatally shoot Texas fugitive after family of 5 killed
https://arab.news/ndkyc
Police fatally shoot Texas fugitive after family of 5 killed
- Lopez had killed a Houston family of five at their cabin and stole their pickup truck
- Lopez, 46, had been the subject of an intensive search since his escape from the prison bus
Kyiv mayor calls for temporary evacuation over heating outages
- “Moscow is trying to use cold weather as a tool of terror,” Zelensky said
- He said 20 residential buildings in Kyiv had been damaged, including the Qatari embassy
KYIV: Mass heating outages caused by Russian strikes on Kyiv are set to last into the weekend, as the capital’s mayor called on residents to temporarily leave the city with sub-zero temperatures expected to fall even lower.
A massive missile and drone attack on Kyiv killed four and ripped open apartment blocks. Moscow also fired its feared Oreshnik ballistic missile at western Ukraine, drawing condemnation from Europe.
The barrage came hours after Moscow rejected a plan by Kyiv and its Western allies to deploy peacekeeping forces to Ukraine should a ceasefire be reached.
AFP journalists in Kyiv saw residents running for shelter late Thursday night as the air raid siren echoed, and heard Russian drones exploding into residential buildings and missiles whistling over the capital.
“Moscow is trying to use cold weather as a tool of terror,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said at a meeting in Kyiv with British Defense Secretary John Healy.
He said 20 residential buildings in Kyiv had been damaged, including the Qatari embassy, in one of the largest attacks on the capital for months.
Qatar expressed “deep regret” over the embassy hit and said that none of its staff there had been harmed.
- ‘Very difficult’ situation -
The Russian barrage left around half of all apartment blocks in the capital, some 6,000 buildings, without heating, Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko said.
Temperatures are set to fall to -15C on Saturday.
Officials said they were hopeful some heating could be restored on Friday night.
“In some areas where the damage is more complex, additional time is needed,” Ukraine’s Restoration Minister Oleksiy Kuleba said.
Klitschko said the situation was “very difficult” and called on “residents of the capital who have the opportunity to temporarily leave the city for places with alternative sources of power and heat to do so.”
City authorities said they had set up 1,200 warming centers.
- Russia fires rarely-used missile -
A medic who died at a building that was struck in a repeat attack was among the four killed, officials said. Another 26 were wounded.
Nina, 70, who lives in one of the buildings hit, told AFP she was angry that the world was talking about a possible deal to end the conflict at a time when Russia was launching such deadly barrages.
“Where is Europe, where is America? It doesn’t hurt them the same way,” she said.
Her neighbor, 58-year-old Kostiantyn Kondratchenko fought the second-floor blaze from a drone hit with a hose used to water flowers, he told AFP.
The barrage is just the latest to batter Ukraine as diplomats wrangle for a breakthrough in what has been Europe’s deadliest conflict since World War II.
Russia has shown no sign of slowing down its ground offensive or aerial bombardments.
Moscow’s defense ministry said it had fired the Oreshnik ballistic missile on “strategic targets” — only the second time the new weapon, which the Kremlin says is impossible to stop, is known to have been used.
- ‘Escalatory and unacceptable’ -
Ukrainian authorities said a ballistic missile traveling “at about 13,000 kilometers (8,000 miles) per hour” had struck an “infrastructure facility” near the western city of Lviv.
It said Russia had attacked “civilian infrastructure,” without specifying the target or extent of any damage.
The Oreshnik is an intermediate-range ballistic missile that can be equipped with both nuclear and conventional warheads.
Lviv region officials said that radiation levels were within normal range after the attack.
France, Germany and Britain condemned Moscow’s “escalatory and unacceptable” use of Oreshnik, a UK government spokeswoman said after a call between leaders of the three countries.
Across the border in Russia’s Belgorod, the governor said more than half a million people were without power or heating after a Ukrainian attack targeted the region’s utilities.
Despite intense diplomatic efforts led by US President Donald Trump, a deal to end the fighting remains elusive.
Moscow baulked this week after European leaders and US envoys announced post-war guarantees for Ukraine would include a US-led monitoring mechanism and a multinational force.
Russia called the plan “dangerous” and “destructive.”
Key territorial issues are also unresolved as Russia insists on getting full control of Ukraine’s Donbas region, part of which is still controlled by Kyiv.
Russia occupies around 20 percent of Ukraine.
Tens of thousands have been killed since it invaded in February 2022, millions forced to flee their homes and much of eastern and southern Ukraine decimated.
