Micah Johnson’s mother, Delphine Johnson, told The Blaze website (http://bit.ly/29y8V5u ) in an interview published Monday that her son wanted to be a police officer as a child and that his six years in the Army Reserve, including a tour in Afghanistan, were “not what Micah thought it would be. what he thought the military represented, it just didn’t live up to his expectations”. Therefore, he said, he approved a hastily conceived plan to detonate a bomb near the gunman and would “do it again if presented with the same circumstances”. “I didn’t see it coming”, said Johnson’s father, James.
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Upon investigating Johnson’s home and finding “a bunch of explosive materials” and a “personal journal of combat tactics”, authorities said they believe he was planning a larger attack that may have been pushed up due to the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. Police later found a stockpile of weapons and bomb-making materials at Johnson’s home.
Police had expected the Dallas protesters to remain in one area of the city center, but demonstrators spontaneously chose to march in a different direction, Brown said. Dallas Police Chief David Brown provided new details about the tense two-hour standoff that police had with the gunman before he was killed.
The gunman wrote the letters “RB” and other markings, but the meaning was unclear.
When asked about additional suspects, Brown said he is still not convinced that Johnson was working along.
One officer was hurt when a rioter dropped a 25-pound chunk of concrete on his head from a bridge or overpass, police spokesman Steve Linders said.
“[For] all the crap we gotta take as police officers, the satisfaction we get from serving is much more gratifying”, he added.
“We had negotiated with him for about two hours, and he just basically lied to us – playing games, laughing at us, singing, asking how many [police officers] did he get and that he wanted to kill some more and that there were bombs there”, Brown said, “so there was no progress on the negotiation”.
Investigators say they now believe that Johnson essentially shadowed the march, driving from street to street, and then parked the vehicle and went to higher ground where he could get a better vantage point on police.
Though robots increasingly offer law enforcement officers safer access to unsafe situations, the use of the robot early Friday morning marked one of the few – if not the only – instance of American officers using a robot to kill a civilian on US soil.
“Bravery is not a strong enough word to describe what they did that day”, Brown said of officers’ response to Thursday’s events.
A candlelight vigil was set for 8 p.m. on Monday in Dallas City Hall plaza. Two of them used the explosive device that eventually killed Johnson as he was holed up inside a parking garage in downtown. Bryan Shaw and Officer John Abbott were hurt in Thursday’s attack. The school said Shaw was treated on scene and returned to protect other officers and civilians.
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The most recent shooting deaths by police come after several years of contentious killings by law enforcement officers, including that of Michael Brown, a teenager whose death in the summer of 2014 caused riots and weeks of protests in the St Louis suburb of Ferguson. Its number of wounded did not include any El Centro College officers.
