Among Dallas investigators’ current goals: Figure out what Johnson had meant by “RB”, lettering that Brown said he’d written on the wall in blood before his death.
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The police chief defended the decision to kill Johnson with a bomb delivered by remote-controlled robot, saying he had “already killed us in a grave way, and officers were in surgery that didn’t make it”.
“He just basically lied to us; playing games, laughing at us, singing, asking how many did he get and that he wanted to kill some more and that there were bombs there”, Brown said, explaining that negotiations had broken down.
Authorities say Johnson killed five police officers and wounded seven others and two civilians during an attack at a protest over last week’s killings by police of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota.
Brown also revealed a chilling mystery about Johnson.
He added that using the robot to detonate the explosive device that killed Johnson was an idea put together in about 15 minutes.
“We are not going to let a coward who would ambush our police officers change our democracy”, Dallas Police Chief David Brown told reporters.
Two of the three individuals apprehended were released, however, one man was charged with a misdemeanor as he was not legally allowed to carry a gun, Brown said.
“I approved it and would do it again if presented with same circumstances”, Brown told CNN, referring to the strategy of deploying a bomb-equipped robot into a room where the suspect was holed up after his shooting rampage.
“It was a hard decision because the safety of our police officers were in our mind, we had just lost so many”, Rawlings said speaking on CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday.
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.
Family members also said they never heard Johnson speak about hatred toward white people.
“You have to trust your people to make the calls … to save their lives”, he said.
The chief said the protest had initially been planned as a “static” rally, not a march, and that his officers had needed to scramble to block intersections once the protesters began a spontaneous walk through downtown Dallas.
But authorities said a full-scale riot broke out in Saint Paul, Minnesota and resulted in 102 arrests.
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Brown said he wanted to avoid his own officers shouldering the responsibility of security for the president due to “the fatigue factor” following the events of the last week. Authorities are now looking through Johnson’s writings and possessions to try to figure out what those apparent initials mean.
