In an interview with The Blaze, the parents of Micah Xavier Johnson, 25, who shot 12 police officers and killed five at a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas last week, said that their son was changed after serving in the military.
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Dallas police chief David Brown said Johnson had told a negotiator that he had wanted to kill white people, especially white police officers, because he was angry about the recent shootings of black men by police.
The Dallas police chief defended the department’s use of a robot-delivered bomb to kill the suspect in Thursday’s shooting.
“He thought what he was doing was righteous and believed he was going to make us pay for what he saw as law enforcement’s efforts to punish people of colour”. Brown also updated the number of police officers wounded in Thursday’s sniper attack – which took place at the end of a peaceful protest over the fatal police shootings of two black men elsewhere in the United States – from seven to nine.
In Georgia, Missouri and Tennessee, authorities said gun-wielding civilians also shot officers in individual attacks that came after the two black men died at the hands of police in Louisiana and Minnesota.
The department said on Twitter that it searched the garage with officers and dogs to ensure a report of a suspicious person was thoroughly investigated. “I didn’t see it coming”, said Johnson’s father, James. Dallas police later killed Micah by detonating a bomb via a robot.
Johnson, an Army veteran, scrawled a message in blood on a parking garage wall before police killed him with a bomb-toting robot.
Johnson was discharged under “other than honorable” conditions after he was accused of sexually harassing a colleague, Bradford Glendening, the military lawyer who represented him, told The Associated Press. However, authorities have said they believe others were involved. He said that indicated the killer could have done more damage with more time but used the protest in Dallas to strike in a more limited, albeit deadly, fashion.
Brown said that they have to do that for the sake of their families.
At least two Dallas Police Department buildings are now blocked off, with numerous police vehicles and armed officers outside.
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However, when the shooting started, those individuals “began to run”, marking them as suspects to law enforcement until their involvement could be ruled out.
