The gunman who shot a dozen Dallas police officers at a protest, killing five, planned to wreak even more havoc on the city – and planned it well in advance, the police chief said Sunday.
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Police say Johnson didn’t have any explosives built, but he had plenty of materials to create pipe bombs.
Days of protests began in response to police shootings last week of two black men – one in Louisiana, the other in Minnesota.
Authorities have named Micah Johnson as the lone gunman in the Dallas attack, saying he had served in Afghanistan, embraced militant black nationalism, professed anger over police shootings and a desire to “kill white people, especially white officers”. “This wasn’t some novice”, Brown said.
And at one point, Johnson, apparently wounded, wrote the letters “rb” in his own blood on a wall at the community college where he holed up during the shooting last Thursday.
Dallas Police Chief Brown, who said he and his family have received death threats, challenged those who have been protesting to consider working in law enforcement. Organizer Ashley Gantt says protestors sat down when police moved in to avoid being seen as aggressive. “And it ended up being a fatal funnel”.
The officers used a Remotec 485-pount robot with a military-grade explosive to kill Micah Johnson.
Both Brown and Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings defended the department’s decision to use a bomb robot to end the standoff.
Brown said Johnson was in a position where officers would have had to expose themselves to “grave danger” to get a shot at him. The suspect said he was upset at white people.
The protesters were chanting “black lives matter”, “hands up, don’t shoot” and “racist police, our streets”.
“I would like you to join me and asking, ‘Who is my neighbor?'” Azorji, who is black, told the congregation.
“We still haven’t ruled out whether or not if others were complicit and it’s just the way we do things, we want to make sure we follow every lead and make sure we don’t miss any pieces of evidence we don’t know yet”, Brown told CNN.
Two of the three detainees were subsequently released, including a woman who was running with people who were armed, Brown said.
Protesters will not be “allowed to incite hate and violence, to engage in unlawful activities”, he added.
The chief made the comments Sunday morning in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper.
He stressed that Johnson had to be stopped because he was “determined to hurt more officers, and without our actions, he would’ve hurt more officers”.
He leapfrogged ahead of demonstrators and stopped when he saw an opportunity to take “high ground” from where he could target police, Brown said.
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Officials have searched a home Johnson shared with his mother in Mesquite, Texas, just outside of Dallas, but they tell NPR it is unclear how much time Johnson actually spent at that residence and whether he may have other apartments in the area that they haven’t yet discovered.
