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.
Advertisement
The officers were shot during a Thursday evening protest that was meant to be peaceful and draw attention to racial tensions over a number of police-involved incidents nationwide.
Dallas police chief David Brown said all of his officers are on edge after the events, and his family has received death threats.
Dallas police investigating the killings say Johnson was planning an even larger attack.
But it appeared Johnson’s anger reached breaking point after a duo of police shootings of black men in one week.
An undated handout image released by the Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) Police shows DART police officer Brent Thompson at an undisclosed location.
“The demented individual who carried out those attacks in Dallas, he’s no more representative of African-Americans than the shooter in Charleston was representative of white Americans or the shooter in Orlando or San Bernardino were representative of Muslim-Americans”, Obama said, referring to a string of mass shootings in the past year.
Inside Story – US police killings: What role does prejudice play? Police later found a stockpile of weapons and bomb-making materials at Johnson’s home.
A top elected official in Dallas said Thursday’s attack looked like a “crime of opportunity”.
During negotiations with police, the lone gunman revealed that his motive was to target “white people” in the wake of two back-to-back police shootings of black citizens in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, earlier in the week. Nine other officers and two civilians were wounded by Micah Xavier Johnson with an assault rifle before he, too, was killed by police using a robot to carry a bomb into his vicinity and detonate it.
Officers swarmed the department’s headquarters, searching for a reported suspicious person in a garage next to the building, before finally issuing an all-clear.
Authorities believe the shooter drove until he was well ahead of the protesters, stopping where he saw an opportunity to take “high ground” in buildings, Mr Brown said.
Authorities are downloading more than 170 hours of officers’ body camera footage and collecting “countless hours” of dashcam video as well.
Advertisement
Johnson had practiced military-style drills in his yard and trained at a private self-defense school that teaches special tactics, including “shooting on the move”, a maneuver in which an attacker fires and changes position before firing again.
