Dallas Police Chief David Brown said in a news conference that officials are reviewing 300 witness statements and collecting video footage from body cameras, dashboard cameras, and surveillance cameras at the intersection in downtown Dallas where 25-year-old Micah Johnson opened fire Thursday night.
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Mr Brown said: “We believe he had been practising explosive detonations and that the materials were large enough to have devastating effects”.
“We’re going to turn over every rock” to make sure Johnson was the only person planning the attack, he said, and that the department is following “any and all leads”.
Micah Johnson, the man who shot 12 police officers, killing 5, in Dallas on Thursday night may have had grandiose plans of mayhem, according to the head of police.
Brown said he stood by his decision but understood why questions have been raised about the use of deadly force against the gunman, rather than opting for a non-lethal method to disable him. “I approved it”, Brown said.
Investigators say they now believe that Johnson essentially shadowed the march, driving from street to street, and then parked the auto and went to higher ground where he could get a better vantage point on police. “Other options would have exposed our officers to great danger”, he said.
Johnson was a private first class with a specialty in carpentry and masonry. “We had negotiated with him for about two hours, and he just basically lied to us-playing games, laughing at us, singing, asking how many [police officers] did he get and that he wanted to kill some more and that there were bombs there”, Brown said.
Brown also said two El Centro students hid in the building overnight, because they were afraid to come out until the shooting stopped.
Detectives are now trying to work out the meaning of Johnson’s blood messages, and are hoping that they’ll help reveal his state of mind.
Johnson, who had served with the U.S. Army Reserve and had been deployed in Afghanistan, had been “disappointed” in his experience with the military, his mother told TheBlaze.com in an interview broadcast online on Monday.
But a search of Johnson’s Dallas-area home after he was ultimately killed by police turned up bomb-making materials and a manual in which he wrote about military tactics.
That, Brown said, is when his officers devised a plan to use a robot to detonate a bomb near the gunman.
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Both parents agreed their son never showed any outward signs of hatred for white people, indeed Johnson’s stepmother, Donna, is white.
