Lopez’s escape last month sparked one of the largest attempts to search for detainees in the state’s history, as hundreds of police searched the wooded area where he is believed to be hiding. Authorities say the fugitive killed a family at their home in County Leon last week and later died in a shootout with police. A few days before killing 66-year-old Mark Collins and his four grandchildren, Lopez broke into a neighboring property, according to Robert Hirst, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Collins and his grandchildren were visiting the family ranch at the weekend outside Centralville, Texas, near where the inmate had escaped three weeks earlier, and police were searching the perimeter after the escape, according to the Department of Public Safety. of Texas. Lopez broke into the neighboring Ranch Collins’s home 24-48 hours before his attack on the family, Hurst said. No one was home next door at the time. Law enforcement officials did not appear to warn residents that there were signs of suspicious activity in the house next to the ranch, according to CNN conversations with locals. Asked why locals were not notified as soon as law enforcement officers suspected the burglary, a Texas prison spokesman said a DNA test was needed to confirm Lopez had broken into the house. Mark Collins and his four grandchildren were shot and stabbed to death, according to Houston Crime Stoppers’s director of services and defense, Andy Kahan, who says he met with the Collins family in the days following the killings. After killing the family, Lopez stole their truck and was quickly named by authorities as the main suspect in the killings. On June 2, the fugitive was killed in an exchange of gunfire with police in the town of Jourdanton, hundreds of miles from Collins’s home, the DCJ said. Police managed to deactivate the truck with a pin strip, causing Lopez to crash. He then got into a fight with police, the DCJ said. “He fired several rounds at officers and was armed with an AR-15 and a pistol,” said Jason Clark of the DCJ, adding that they believe the guns were probably stolen from the house in Centerville where the family was killed. No officers were injured. The grandchildren Lopez killed were identified as brothers Willon, 18, Carson, 16, and Hudson, 11, and their cousin, Bryson Collins, 11. The family pastor, Steve Bezner, called Collins and his grandchildren an “amazing family” who were “close and in deep faith.”
Other detainees were distracted, the state said
The detainee escaped on May 12 while being transported to a medical appointment in Huntsville, Texas, according to authorities. Lopez, 46, who was serving two life sentences for manslaughter, attempted murder and aggravated convictions for kidnapping, was in a “separate, caged area of the bus intended for high-risk detainees,” according to a Texas DCJ statement. As the bus approached Centerville, the other 15 inmates on the bus began to make noise and distract, allowing Lopez to escape, Hurst told CNN. Inside the cage, Lopez used a “prison knife and key” to break free from his handcuffs and cut the cage to reach the jail’s prison warden, according to the Texas senator. John Whitmeyer, who chairs the Senate Committee on Criminal Justice and receives regular updates from law enforcement. DCJ authorities have previously stated that the detainee cut the bottom of the cage before stabbing the driver with “some kind of object” and tried unsuccessfully to seize the officer’s service weapon. Lopez and the driver got off the bus and a second police officer in the back of the vehicle got off and started approaching the detainee, DCJ said. Lopez returned to the bus and drove a short distance, authorities said. Police fired back tires, causing Lopez to crash into a short distance on the road, according to authorities. The detainee then ran into the woods along Highway 7 in County Leon. For three weeks, Lopez avoided police as a massive manhunt was under way to locate him. During the first two weeks of the investigation, prison officials conducted multiple briefings on the search efforts involving about 400 police officers on the ground, investigating the wooded area where Lopez is believed to be hiding. “We had no idea where he was,” Hurst told CNN. “How he managed to give everyone the slip was incredibly disappointing.”
