The
repeatedly deported Mexican fugitive sought in an wide-ranging manhunt for massacring a family of five Hondurans next door, in the nation’s largest illegal immigrant community, maintained an elaborate
“Santa Muerte death cult”shrine in the master bedroom whose candles were still burning Monday, according to a law enforcement officer who saw it.
The shrine of multiple statues reflecting various patron saints, one of them four feet tall and a half dozen smaller ones was replete with a stack of $2 bills, freshly cut flowers, and tinfoil filled with what appeared to be a drug as offerings to ostensibly protect Francisco Oropesa (sometimes spelled Oropeza), the suspected murderer. Two tall candles depicting various
muerte cult “saints” were still burning two days after the killings, the law enforcement officer said. The shrine was arrayed in the bedroom around a double-stack glass shelving piece, the source said.
Santa Muerte adherents throughout Mexico, where the cult blossomed among drug trafficking cartel syndicates in recent decades and also the non-cartel criminal underworld, believe prayers and offerings to Santa Muerte (the Saint of Death) as well as other saints, idols, and figurines, protect drug loads and stave off arrest for their criminality. Some have taken on the symbols of the cult for social and cultural reasons. One of Oropesa’s tattoos features the iconic Santa Muerte figure, a skeletal figure draped in robes and holding a sickle.
While the implications of a serious shrine in a private bedroom of Oropesa’s Cleveland, Texas, area home should not be construed as definitive proof of his criminality, experts say its presence there and in a tattoo on his arm does strongly indicate that Oropesa was involved in at least semi-organized criminal activity and that he would have access to an underworld network that could hide and move him into Mexico.
“Anyone who has a Santa Muerta shrine is linked to the criminal underworld,” said retired Texas Department of Public Safety Captain Jaeson Jones, who worked for years on intelligence to counter Mexico’s drug cartels. “It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re connected to the cartels, even though the cartels all over Mexico follow the cult. But you can at least link him to the criminal underground through Santa Muerta.”
The repeatedly deported Mexican fugitive sought in an wide-ranging manhunt for massacring a family of five Hondurans next door, in the nation’s largest illegal immigrant community, maintained an elaborate “Santa Muerte death cult” shrine in the master bedroom whose candles were still burning...
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