The Army veteran who served in Afghanistan “obviously had some delusion”, Brown said, giving new details about how he scrawled the letters “RB” on a wall with his blood before he was killed with a robot bomb.
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The chief defended the decision to kill Johnson with a bomb delivered by remote-controlled robot, saying negotiations went nowhere and that officers could not approach him without putting themselves in danger.
Following his death, police raided his house, where he lived with his mother and her wife, and found bomb-making materials, ballistic vests, rifles, ammunition, and a personal journal of combat tactics.
Investigators with the Dallas Police Department believe the shooting that claimed the lives of five police officers and injured seven others Thursday could have been much worse.
Before he was killed by police, Johnson, who was black, told officers he specifically targeted white police officers because hewas upset by last week’s fatal police shootings of two black men, one day apart: Alton Sterling in Louisiana, and Philando Castile in Minnesota.
During the vigil on Monday night, which was also attended by police officials, relatives and friends of the killed people, Dallas Police Association President Ron Pinkston read out the names of all the fallen officers, Xinhua news agency reported.
“I can just tell you he was clear of mind, determined to hurt more officers”, Brown said.
Negotiations broke down, we had an exchange of gunfire with the suspect, we saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was.
Dallas police chief David Brown invited protesters to be the change they want to see by applying for a job as a police officer.
Brown also indicated that Johnson had always been planning of such an attack but chose to use Thursday’s protest as an event at which to pull it off. “What we’re doing and what we’re trying to accomplish here is above challenging, it is”.
“There is a heightened sense of awareness around threats we’ve received all over the country”, Brown said.
According to the police chief, Johnson insisted on speaking only to a black police officer when he began negotiating.
Amid the protests against police brutality spreading across the country, Dallas is still haunted by the death of five officers at the hands of a lone gunman.
One of the gunmen behind last week’s shooting in Dallas wrote cryptic messages on the wall in his own blood.
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The large crime scene includes the parking garage where Johnson was killed and at least two other sites where he is believed to have fired at officers.
