The 25-year-old had friends but a lot of them were on Facebook. And on a hot summer evening last Thursday in Dallas, his resentment boiled over into murderous intent culminating in the death of six people. Dallas Police Chief David Brown and Mayor Mike Rawlings made several allusions Friday to officers being attacked by snipers or “sniped” at.
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“The world saw him as a mass-murderer. Why?”
Johnson, a private in the American Army, was deployed to Afghanistan in November 2013 with the 420th Engineer Brigade.
At his court martial, the army called for him to be dishonourably discharged – a request that was “highly unusual” since the court usually orders the accused to have counselling before considering more drastic steps.
When Johnson was accused of sexual harassment by a female soldier in Afghanistan, he was sent back to the US with the recommendation he receive an “other than honorable” discharge, but he later got an honorable discharge, said Bradford Glendening, a military lawyer. “I’m sure that this guy was the black sheep of his unit”.
Glendening said Johnson was set to be removed from the Army in September 2014 because of the incident, but instead got an honorable discharge months later – for reasons he can’t understand.
Johnson was believed to have shared a two-story tan brick home in Mesquite with family members, who didn’t immediately comment on the attack. His parents separated when Johnson was a child, divorcing in 1996, and his father James subsequently married a teacher, Donna Ferrier, who is white.
Details of how Johnson spent the next – and as it turned out, the last – two years of his life are still sketchy.
Everman suggested that Johnson “let me know when you make it down this way”. “It is time to visit Louisiana and hold a barbeque”.
The police officers escorting the Black Lives Matter protestors had been marching with them in solidarity.
But Johnson’s Facebook page ties him to a number of organizations listed as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which studies such movements in the United States.
Some wore T-shirts that read, “I can’t keep calm I have a black son” or “Black Lives Matter”.
His photo showed him wearing a dashiki and raising his fist over the words “Black Power”, and his cover shot carried the red, black and green Pan-African flag. One, Sharon Carter recalled, ” He kept to himself”. Cooper says Johnson had a “cool vibe” and wasn’t really political but did seem educated. The pair played basketball together in a local park, but Johnson was obsessive.
“He just loved his job”, his sister said.
“I don’t know how I’m supposed to be feeling, or what I’m supposed to be thinking”, said music teacher Nora Woolpert, she sat in the grass across the street from one of the blockades.
He served in the U.S. Army Reserve from March 2009 to April 2015, training as a carpentry and masonry specialist, according to Pentagon records.
Police raided Johnson’s home on Friday and found a cache of guns, a hand-written journal listing “combat tactics”, body armour and bomb-making equipment. One neighbour knew Johnson kept guns at home because some had been stolen in a break-in previous year. “He’d ask me if I was OK when I was on my own”.
Obama, while saying there was a “persistent problem of African-Americans and Latinos being treated differently in our criminal justice system”, stressed he did not believe the country was descending into the polarisation seen in the sometimes violent civil rights struggles of the 1960s.
The protests erupted after videos surfaced showing fatal police encounters with two black men, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, in Louisiana and Minnesota, respectively.
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From his hideout in a garage, he warned the police that he had planted bombs “all over the place in this garage and downtown”, adding ominously, “The end is coming”. And a man who killed one person and wounded three others – including an officer – in Tennessee apparently told investigators he was motivated by the recent killings of black men by police.
