DALLAS – The suspect in the deadly attack on Dallas police taunted authorities during two hours of negotiations, laughing at them, singing and at one point asking how many officers he had shot, the police chief said Sunday.
The chief and the county’s most senior elected official also said Micah Johnson had larger attack plans and possessed enough explosive material to inflict far greater harm.
“We’re convinced that this suspect had other plans and thought that what he was doing was righteous and believed that he was going to target law enforcement make us pay for what he sees as law enforcement’s efforts to punish people of color,” Brown told CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Johnson, a black Army veteran, insisted on a black negotiator and wrote in blood on the wall of a parking garage where police cornered and later killed him, Brown said.
The gunman wrote the letters “RB” and other markings, but the meaning was unclear. Investigators are trying to decipher the writing by looking through evidence from Johnson’s suburban Dallas home, Brown said.
The writing suggested Johnson was wounded in a shootout with police. An autopsy will confirm exactly how many times he was hit, Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins said.
Authorities do not “have any independent report from an officer saying, `I think I hit him,”’ Jenkins said.
The police 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.
Brown said he became increasingly concerned that “at a split second, he would charge us and take out many more before we would kill him.”
The shootings marked the deadliest day for U.S. law enforcement since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. In all, 12 officers were shot just a few blocks from where President John F. Kennedy was slain in 1963.
So far, the evidence points to the attack being a “crime of opportunity,” Jenkins said.
Investigators believe Johnson had been practicing and training for a long time and probably learned of the protest from social media and concluded there would be many police present.
Authorities have said the 25-year-old gunman kept a journal of combat tactics and had amassed a personal arsenal at his home that included bomb-making materials.
The fact that Johnson had material for explosives and talked of using homemade bombs during the standoff with police indicated he could have inflicted more damage with more time, Jenkins said.
“If this had not been a crime of opportunity where the protest was quickly organized in response to events in the same week ... he could have caused a lot more harm than he did,” he said.
Federal agents are trying to trace the origin of the weapons used in the attack, including a military-style semi-automatic rifle.
About 30 agents are also involved in identifying bullet casings, said William Temple, the Dallas agent in charge for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
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.
Johnson was a private first class with a specialty in carpentry and masonry. He served in the Army Reserve for six years starting in 2009 and did one tour in Afghanistan from November 2013 to July 2014, the military said.
The attack began Thursday evening while hundreds of people were gathered to protest the police killings of Philando Castile, who was fatally shot near St. Paul, Minnesota, and Alton Sterling, who was shot in Louisiana after being pinned to the pavement by two white officers.
Video showed protesters marching along a downtown street about half a mile from City Hall when shots erupted and the crowd scattered, seeking cover.
Activist released
DeRay Mckesson, a prominent activist associated with the police reform protest movement, was released Sunday afternoon after being taken into custody about 11 p.m. the night before.
Mckesson was arrested in Baton Rouge, where he traveled Saturday to demonstrate in solidarity with residents angered by the death of Alton Sterling.
Two fellow activists who witnessed the arrest described it as a physically violent encounter.
“The officers won’t give their names,” said Brittany Packnett, a co-founder with Mckesson of the group Campaign Zero, a prominent activist collective. “He was clearly targeted.”
She later tweeted that 100 people were arrested in Baton Rouge. A Baton Rouge parish prison official later told The Washington Post that more than 120 people were arrested across multiple protest sites.
Mckesson was charged with obstructing a highway of commerce, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she was not authorized to talk to reporters. She said bond had not been set as of late Sunday morning.
Packnett said Mckesson was using his smartphone to live-stream the ongoing protests when police began forcibly dispersing the crowds. As Mckesson and a group of about eight people walked down the street, an officer approached him and told him that he had been “flagged” and that he would be arrested if he left the sidewalk again.
Moments later, she said, two officers forcefully arrested Mckesson.
“They tackled him. One officer hit the top of his body and another officer the bottom,” Packnett said.
The altercation knocked the phone from Mckesson’s hand, ending his live broadcast of the demonstration, she said.
Blurry video of the moments before Mckesson was taken into custody that was provided to The Post captures his verbal exchange with the officers.
“The police continue to just provoke people,” Mckesson says after an officer yells to a group of people that if they step on the roadway, they will be arrested.
Then an officer says the man in the “loud shoes” has been “flagged”: “You in them loud shoes, if I see you in the road, if I get close to you, you’re going to jail,” an officer can be heard saying on the video.
In response, Packnett says: “We’re on the shoulder. There is no sidewalk, sir.”
Mckesson is known for wearing a pair of red Nike sneakers and a blue vest to the protests he attends.
The group was walking away from a protest that had been dispersed, traveling alongside road traffic on a street that they said does not have a sidewalk.
Activists continued to talk as they walked up the side of the street. Moments later, an officer’s voice is heard: “City police, you’re under arrest.”
“What?” Mckesson exclaims. “I’m under arrest, y’all.”
Then the video and audio feed ends.
As Packnett and Johnetta Elzie, another prominent protester, tweeted in outrage, word spread quickly through the ranks of national police-reform activists, who feared that Mckesson was targeted deliberately and may be harmed in police custody.
In a text message from police custody, Mckesson had said he and 33 others were in custody together, wrists tied, and being taken to a police precinct.
News of Mckesson’s arrest exploded on social media, with more than 100,000 tweets before dawn using the hashtag #FreeDeray. Many had urged people to call Baton Rouge police to demand his release.
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Keywords: black lives matter, baton rouge, police
