CENTERVILLE, Texas — A convicted assassin on the run since escaping a jail bus after stabbing its driver final month was shot lifeless by regulation enforcement late Thursday after he killed a family of 5 and stole their truck from a rural weekend cabin, a Texas jail system spokesman mentioned.
Gonzalo Lopez, 46, was killed about 10:30 p.m. Thursday in Jourdanton, Texas, about 35 miles (55 kilometers) south of San Antonio, mentioned Jason Clark, spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
“Law enforcement in Atascosa County positioned the stolen automobile, 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.
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 jail sentence for a 2006 conviction of murdering a person alongside the Texas-Mexico border.