The Dallas gunman who shot and killed five Dallas law-enforcement officers and injured several others taunted police during negotiations and seemed to have other plans, “possibly for a larger attack”, Dallas Police Chief David Brown revealed in a Sunday Interview with CNN’s State of the Union, the Washington Post reports.
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He strongly defended the decision of police to use a bomb mounted on a robot to kill the gunman, believed by criminal justice and legal experts to be the first time that U.S. law enforcement has used a remote controlled explosive device to kill a suspect.
Dallas police chief David Brown said all of his officers are on edge after the events, and his family has received death threats.
But the bomb-making materials, Brown said, suggested that the 25-year old shooter was practicing detonations and could have proficiency to have “devastating effects on our city”.
The attack on Thursday night came at the end of a demonstration over police shootings that had been prompted by incidents earlier in the week in which police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and St. Paul, Minnesota, killed two black men. They are analyzing the information in the journal, police said in a statement.
“They took an inner city kid like me with flaws and made me their police chief”, he said.
Obama is expected to visit Dallas on Tuesday in the wake of the fatal shooting of five police officers.
Johnson, who was an Army veteran described as a “loner”, reportedly insisted on speaking with a black negotiator and wrote the letters “RB” among other markings in his own blood on the wall of a parking garage.
Protesters led by the “Black Lives Matter” movement are demanding justice for two African-Americans shot dead by police this week – their dying moments captured in viral video footage that stunned the nation.
“He lied to us, was playing games and laughing and singing at us, asking how many did he get and he wanted to kill some more”, he said. The Army sent him stateside, recommending an “other than honourable discharge” – which is “highly unusual” because counselling is usually ordered before more drastic steps are taken, said Bradford Glendening, the military lawyer who represented him. Seven other cops and two civilians were wounded.
‘Without our actions, he would have hurt more officers’.
Johnson, a former soldier who had served in Afghanistan, had hundreds of rounds of ammunition strapped to his body when he died.
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Investigators tell NPR they also are starting to look at Johnson’s online history, and have mirrored the hard drive on his computer to see what they might discover there.
