The message was hard to read, Brown said, but investigators could make out the initials R.B. They don’t know what those letters mean, but authorities have found clues – supplies for making bombs and a journal at the shooter’s home – that hint at a larger plot against the police.
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The shooter, Micah Xavier Johnson, was “determined to hurt more officers” and bomb-making materials as well as a journal that were found in his home seem to suggest he had been practicing detonations.
Before Johnson was killed by a bomb-equipped robot, he had sang, laughed and taunted officers, and said he wanted to “kill white people” in retribution for police killings of African-Americans, Brown said.
“We’re convinced this suspect had other plans and thought that what he was doing was right”, Brown said Sunday in an interview on CNN.
“If lethally equipped robots can be used in this situation, when else can they be used?” says Elizabeth Joh, a University of California at Davis law professor who has followed USA law enforcement’s use of technology.
Brown said that his department was going to look under every stone, but he said that the shootings of white police officers by a young black gunman with an assault rifle were a reaction to two recent police shootings of black men, Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in Minnesota. Obama is also expected to meet privately with the families of police officers who were killed or injured.
Brown said the Army veteran was well hidden behind a brick wall, making any attempt by a police sniper too unsafe for the officer. Being a private first class, he had been deployed to Afghanistan from November 2013 to July 2014. According to two law enforcement officials close to the investigation, Johnson’s mother has been cooperating with authorities to help them piece together what happened before the attacks. So far, the department says, it appears that at least 12 officers shot back at Johnson during Thursday night’s firefight.
“[For] all the crap we gotta take as police officers, the satisfaction we get from serving is much more gratifying”, he added. “I began to feel it was a split second before he would charge us and take out many more before we could kill him”.
Delphine Johnson said her son became “gung-ho” and joined the Army after he graduated from high school, but returned to the U.S. disillusioned after his tour in Afghanistan.
“I’d do it again”, Dallas Police Chief David Brown said at a press conference.
Brown also revealed a chilling mystery about Johnson.
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Police kept a number of streets around El Centro College, where Johnson had holed up, stretched with yellow crime scene tape over the weekend.
