The end to the standoff came several hours after a suspect began firing during a protest over recent police shootings in Minnesota and Louisiana and then holed up in a garage, officials said.
“We cornered one suspect and we tried to negotiate for several hours,” Dallas Police Chief David Brown said during a Friday morning news conference, but “negotiations broke down” and turned into “an exchange of gunfire with the suspect.”
The suspect was identified as Micah X. Johnson, 25, a resident of the Dallas area, two U.S. law enforcement officials said.
Johnson had no known criminal history or ties to terror groups, the official said, and has relatives in Mesquite, Texas, which is just east of Dallas.The official said federal agents were assisting Dallas authorities in the investigation.
Authorities believe Johnson belonged
to an informal gun club and took copious amounts of target practice, according
to a law enforcement official.
“We’re hurting. Our profession is
hurting, Dallas officers are hurting,” Brown told reporters. “We don’t feel
much support most days. Let’s not make today most days.”
In Warsaw, President Obama said he
was “horrified” over the shootings and pledged the federal government’s help in
the investigation.
“There has been a vicious,
calculated and despicable attack on law enforcement,” Obama said. “… There
is no possible justification for these kinds of attacks, or any violence
against law enforcement. Justice will be done.”
Brown said a hostage negotiator
spoke with the gunman at length before he was killed about 2:30 a.m.. The chief
said the attacker said he was upset “with white people” and with recent police
shootings. The suspect also said that he was not affiliated with any groups and
that he acted alone, Brown said.
“The suspect said we will eventually
find the IEDs,” Brown said, a reference to explosives. “He wanted to kill
officers. And he expressed killing white people, killing white officers, he
expressed anger for Black Lives Matter.”
“We saw no other option than to use
our bomb robot and place a device on its extension to detonate where the
suspect was,” Brown said, adding that, “other options would have exposed our
officers to grave danger.”
Brown said reports that the suspect
shot himself were incorrect. “The suspect is deceased as a result of detonating
the bomb,” he said.
Brown said other suspects were in
custody, but declined to say how many. Other officials said three suspects were
in custody.
Police believe that the gunman who
was killed “did some of the shooting,” but perhaps not all, Brown said, vowing
that “if there’s someone out there associated with this, we will find you.”
Police were still investigating
Friday, and “we’re working diligently to process the crime scene and find
evidence,” Brown said.
Referring to the gunman’s statements
about his intentions, Brown said: “None of that makes sense. None of that is a
reason to do harm to anyone.” He would not comment about whether the gunman
appeared mentally ill.
Brown said he spoke overnight with
the families of officers killed as well as those injured, most of whom have
been released from the hospital. He said three officers listed in critical
condition are doing better, but that they and the department need the public’s
support.
Mayor Mike Rawlings said also he met
overnight with some families of officers killed and some of the officers
hospitalized.
In addition to police, two
civilians, a man and a woman, were shot and injured, the mayor said.
Of the dozen officers shot (10 men
and two women), eight are Dallas police and four are Dallas Area Rapid Transit
(DART) officers, officials said.
“They know the city is grieving with
them,” Rawlings said.
Rawlings said that when he met with
the wounded officers, he expressed support on behalf of the city and also made
them a promise: “We’ll get the bad guys.”
One of the officers had surgery
overnight and was doing well, Rawlings said. He said he spoke with another
officer shot in the leg, and another shot in the arm.“The one shot in the leg,
three officers from his squad had died, had gone down around him,” Rawlings
said. “He felt sad for the other officers, that people don’t understand the
danger of dealing with a protest. What it can do is put our officers in harm’s
way.”
The shooting broke out late Thursday
during what had been a peaceful protest against shootings by police officers
that claimed the lives of black men in Minneapolis and Baton Rouge, La. About
800 people were marching through downtown, flanked by about 100 police
officers, when the gunfire began.
The violence didn’t end until about
2:30 a.m., when police declared an end to the standoff.
Officials identified one of the
slain officers as Brent Thompson, 43, who had worked for the Dallas
Area Rapid Transit Police Department since 2009. He was the department’s first
officer to be killed in the line of duty. Three other DART officers were
injured but were expected to recover, officials said.
“As you can imagine, our hearts are
broken,” the transit district said in a statement. “This is something that
touches every part of our organization.”
The other officers who were
killed were members of the Dallas Police Department, officials said.
Amanda Mann, a 35-year-old Dallas
resident, said she drove downtown with friends shortly before 7 p.m. to
catch the beginning of the protest in Belo Garden Park, which she had heard
about through Facebook. For the first hour, it felt familiar, much like
previous Black Lives Matter protests she’s been to, she said.
“Until 7:45 there were just some
speakers, they were positive and proactive, then they said we were going to
line up and march,” she said.
Mann said that around 8:30 or 8:45
p.m., as the rally died down and she had walked to her car near El Centro
College, she heard the first barrage of shots as a group of protesters ran
toward her, away from the fire. For about 40 minutes, she said, police
shouted at protesters to move from one block to the next as officers tried
to chase down suspects.
Mann said that at one point she laid
down with a group on the grassy knoll of Dealey Plaza, a downtown park that is
best known as the site of the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy. At
another point, she said, she was near the county jail a few blocks away before
running across the Commerce Street Bridge over the Trinity River, away from the
police scene.
“It was like nothing I had seen
before,” Mann said. “We just kept following what the police told us to
do.”
Dallas police on Thursday night
released a photo of a black man wearing a camouflage shirt and toting a gun.
The department’s official Twitter feed identified the man as a suspect, though
David Brown, the police chief, later described him as a “person of interest.”
The man shown in the photo, Mark
Hughes, told KTVT-TV that he turned himself into police after learning he was
publicly identified as linked to the shooting. He was later released from
custody and told the TV station that he was wrongfully accused.
“Immediately, I flagged down a
police officer,” Hughes said. He said officers subjected him to a
30-minute-long interrogation, and he accused police of lying to him, telling
him they had witnesses and video indicating that he fired his gun.
“At the end of the day, it’s the
system … the system was trying to get me. … Now you all have my face on
national news, are you going to come out and say that this young man had nothing
to do with it?” Hughes said. “At the end of the day…it was persecution on me
unrightly, and I feel that they need to do something about that.”
Post a Comment