“At the scene where (Micah Johnson) was killed, he wrote some lettering in blood on the wall”, Dallas Police Chief David Brown tells CNN in an interview Sunday.
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David Brown told CNN that Johnson wrote the letters “RB” near to where he was eventually blown up by police and officers were still trying to decipher what the message stood for.
The chief also said that, “based on evidence of bombmaking materials and a journal” found at Johnson’s home in Mesquite, Texas, “we’re convinced that this suspect had other plans”, possibly for a larger attack.
They follow videos involving police shootings of black men in Louisiana and MS and the killing of five police officers by a sniper in Dallas earlier this week.
The attack began Thursday evening while hundreds of people were gathered to protest the police killings of Philando Castile, who was fatally shot near St. Paul, Minnesota, and Alton Sterling, who was shot in Louisiana after being pinned to the pavement by two white officers.
He also sang and taunted police during negotiations, asking how many officers he had shot and warned that he wanted to kill more.
Brown said the Army veteran was well hidden behind a brick wall, making any attempt by a police sniper too unsafe for the officer. If he had been successfulit could have caused “devastating effects on our city”, he said.
Police said social media entries showed he subscribed to a militant black nationalist ideology, including an anti-white diatribe posted last week on a Facebook page of a group called the Black Panther Party Mississippi. There is speculation they stood for “Righteous Blood” and refer to Matthew 23:35, which says: “That upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth”.
Both Brown and Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings defended the department’s decision to use a bomb robot to end the standoff.
As well as the five police officers killed, another seven were injured on Thursday. “So it was very important that we realize that he may not be bluffing”.
He said that Johnson planned to use those military-style tactics, which proved especially deadly: “We don’t normally see this kind of moving and shooting from criminal suspects”.
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Mawuli Davis, an African-American attorney and activist in Atlanta, said the unrest continues because there has been no serious dialogue about issues of race and policing. All I know is that this: “This must stop, this divisiveness between our police and our citizens”. Scores of protestors were arrested overnight, including noted Black Lives Matter activist DeRay McKesson, who was arrested in Louisiana. The action is thought to be the first killing by robot carried out by police in the US.
