Three police officers were killed after they were shot by a gunman in Baton Rouge.
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Another video showing the last minutes of a black man named Filando Castile before being killed by the police in Minnesota went viral and triggered a rage wave.
Documents show that gunman Gavin Eugene Long sought to change his name past year to Cosmo Setepenra.
In the Sunday attack, a former Marine dressed in black and carrying extra ammunition shot and killed three Baton Rouge law enforcement officers, less than two weeks after a black man was fatally shot by police there in a confrontation that sparked nightly protests that reverberated nationwide. “Zero have been successful just over simply protesting”.
“You gotta fight back”, he says in a video. “That’s the only way a bully knows to quit”.
U.S. President Barack Obama on Sunday urged Americans to avoid making inflammatory rhetoric after the killing of three police officers in the state of Louisiana.
Montrell Jackson, one of the police oficers shot dead in Sunday’s attack, posted a Facebook message about police work just days before he was shot dead. His occupational expertise was listed as “data network specialist”. He deployed to Iraq from June 2008 to January 2009, according to military records.
Federal authorities are also now looking at ties Long may have had to an anti-government group that he apparently showed support for online, according to a source familiar with the probe.
A spokesman for the Louisiana State Police says they believe Long was the only shooter.
Long, from Kansas City, Missouri, turned 29 on Sunday, the same day he opened fire.
Investigators initially suspected the involvement of multiple shooters, but later determined that Long appeared to have been a lone gunman.
Although he was believed to be the only person who fired at officers, authorities said they were unsure if he had some kind of help.
One was 32-year-old Montell Jackson, a 10-year veteran on the Baton Rouge police force. Both were members of the Uniform Patrol Bureau, the department said in a post on Facebook, and “were great examples of what it means to protect and serve”. An Associated Press reporter said some officers had weapons drawn from behind trees and others were behind police cars and unmarked cars in the residential neighborhood in the southern part of the city.
“These men are husbands, fathers, sons and brothers”, Sheriff Sid Gautreaux said of the officers from his office.
“We are asking for your prayers at this time”, the sheriff said. He would not elaborate but said the gunman “certainly was seeking out police officers”, and he used the word “ambush” to describe the attack.
“We as a nation have to be loud and clear that nothing justifies violence against law enforcement”, he said.
Obama, the first black United States president, has repeatedly called for racial unity.
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“We need to find ways to see each other, to hear each other, to find common ground that we can stand on and have dialogue and not assassinations, not murders, not violence”, he said.
