Former Missouri boarding school student charged in triple police shooting in Houston

A former student of a Missouri boarding school has been identified as the man charged with shooting and wounding three Houston police officers after an hours-long standoff Thursday night.

Roland Caballero, 31, was charged with three counts of attempted capital murder of a police officer, Houston Police said in a tweet Friday night. Caballero had a gunshot wound to the neck, police said, and was hospitalized in stable condition.

Two of the three officers had been released from the hospital as of Friday afternoon, according to Houston Police. The third is in stable condition, police said.

Caballero attended Agape Boarding School in Stockton, Missouri, as a teenager from around 2005 to 2008, former students told The Star.

“We grew up together at Agape,” said Colton Schrag, who said he saw the news about the shooting Friday while working in an oil field in Texas.

“I was watching it unfold on the news and I was just like, ‘Wow.’ Then I saw the name and I thought, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’ It’s definitely him. I recognized him just like it was yesterday.”

Schrag said Caballero came to Agape from Houston.

“The staff members tended to single him out quite a bit,” he said. “He left when he turned 18. He was there probably three-and-a-half years.”

After Agape, he said, Caballero was repeatedly in trouble, Schrag said.

“He’s been in trouble his whole life.”

Another former student, Jay Frazier, who was at Agape in 2006 and 2007, identified the recent mugshots of Caballero as the person he attended the school with.

An email to the director of Agape was not immediately returned.

Since early last year, Agape has been the subject of an investigation into allegations of abuse. In September, five staff members were charged in Cedar County with physically assaulting students. And last month, a Stockton doctor who has treated Agape students for years was charged in Greene and Cedar counties with 11 counts of child sex abuse.

According to KPRC 2 Houston, the NBC affiliate TV station, records from the Texas Department of Public Safety show that Caballero had been arrested several times since he was 18 years old.

Schrag said he’d heard from numerous former Agape students who saw Caballero on the news Friday morning. The story was making national headlines as violence against law enforcement officers has been escalating in recent days. One week ago, two New York Police Department officers were fatally shot in Harlem while responding to a disturbance call.

The incident with Caballero began around 2:40 p.m. Thursday in downtown Houston. Police had responded to a disturbance call and said Caballero “took off from the scene as soon as he spotted the officers,” according to ABC13.

Officials say that Caballero soon crashed the car he was in and shot at officers as they arrived at his location, ABC13 reported.

After leading police on another chase, Caballero barricaded himself into a home for several hours, the station reported.

Houston Police Chief Troy Finner briefed the media on the incident and his department posted a video clip from that on social media Thursday evening.

“The suspect barricaded himself in for several hours,” Finner said. “Our SWAT team and other negotiators tried to negotiate with him to get him out.”

Cabello eventually surrendered at 7:45 p.m. Thursday, Finner said.

The Houston Police Department posted about the shooting on Twitter Thursday night, saying, “Thank you for the prayers today for our 3 injured officers. … All work at NE Patrol & are stable. Please continue to pray for them & their families.”

Late Friday morning, the department posted an update on the three.

“Great news to report that Officers (N.) Gadson and (D.) Hayden have been released from the hospital,” the tweet said. “Officer (A.) Alvarez remains hospitalized in stable condition.”

The department did not use the officers’ first names.

Schrag said he, Caballero and another student were the subjects of a violent restraint by several staff members at Agape in April 2007. Schrag told The Star in October 2020 about the incident and described it in testimony he sent to Missouri lawmakers last year as they held hearings on a bill which later passed and gives the state more oversight over unlicensed boarding schools.

Schrag also testified in person at one of the legislative hearings in Jefferson City.

In his written testimony, Schrag said Caballero had been taken from the dorm into a hallway for rolling a fake marijuana joint out of paper. Then, Schrag said, he and another student were sent to the hallway as well.

“As I walked out of the dorm of about 175 boys I was met in the hallway by 5 staff members and one student (Roland Caballero) who had a bloody nose, two black eyes, his shirt was shredded and arms were bruised due to a restraint he had just received for rolling a fake joint,” Schrag wrote in his statement.

He said the three were then accused of plotting an escape and when they refused to give staffers the answer they wanted, they were restrained and repeatedly punched in the face, kicked and slammed to the floor.

Schrag, who has become one of the strongest vocal advocates for boarding school oversight, said he hoped the incident in Houston Thursday night didn’t give people a bad impression of all Agape students.

“There are success stories out there, too,” he said. “He chose a bad path, and I chose to do better with my life. It’s sad. He’ll be in prison the rest of his life.

“My heart goes out to the officers involved, and I pray for their swift recoveries.”