CreditSmiley N. Pool/The Dallas Morning News, via Associated Press
DALLAS — A military veteran who said his goal was to kill white police officers opened fire Thursday night in downtown Dallas, leaving five officers dead and seven wounded before the police killed him with a remote-controlled explosive delivered by a robot, officials said.
The gunfire erupted just before 9 p.m., aimed at officers who were monitoring a demonstration by thousands of people protesting the fatal shootings earlier in the week of black men by police officers in Minnesotaand Louisiana. The peaceful march quickly gave way to chaos and screams as terrified people, including families with children, ran for cover, while police officers with guns drawn ran the other way, toward the shooting, and returned fire. Two civilians were wounded by gunfire.
During a standoff that lasted for hours after the attack, the sniper said he wanted to kill more officers, claimed — apparently falsely — to have planted explosives in the area, and told police negotiators that “he was upset about Black Lives Matter,” the Dallas police chief, David O. Brown, said on Friday.
“He said he was upset about the recent police shootings,” Chief Brown said. “The suspect said he was upset at white people. The suspect stated he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.”
The attack was the deadliest for law enforcement officers in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.
The police arrested three people, but there was some uncertainty about the number of gunmen. At first, officials said that multiple snipers had carried out a coordinated ambush of the officers — some of whom were shot in the back, the chief said — but later, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said that the suspect killed by the police, identified as Micah Johnson, 25, appeared to be the sole gunman and to have no links with any international terrorist organizations.
Searching the gunman’s home on Friday, “detectives found bomb-making materials, ballistic vests, rifles, ammunition, and a personal journal of combat tactics,” the Dallas Police Department said in a statement.
Chief Brown declined to identify the people who were arrested, or to say if there might have been others involved. The gunman claimed he acted alone, he said, but “we’re not satisfied that we’ve exhausted every lead.”
Mr. Johnson, an Army Reserve veteran who served in Afghanistan and lived in the Dallas area, had no criminal record, the police said. Investigators have not turned up any evidence that Mr. Johnson, who was black, had direct ties to the Black Lives Matter movement or to other political groups. But his Facebook page indicated support for the New Black Panther Party, a militant group that has advocated violence against whites.
The sequence of events this week tore at a nation already deeply divided over questions of policing and race, moving from anger and despair over shootings of black men by the police to officers being targeted in apparent retaliation. It dealt a blow both to law enforcement and to peaceful critics of the police, who have fended off claims that the outcry over police shootings foments violence and puts officers’ lives in danger.
“All I know is that this must stop, this divisiveness between our police and our citizens,” said Chief Brown, who is black.
Just hours after President Obama, reacting to video recordings of the shootings in Baton Rouge, La., and Falcon Heights, Minn., spoke in anguished terms about the disparate treatment of the races by the criminal justice system, he felt compelled to speak again, this time about the people who attacked officers.
“We will learn more, undoubtedly, about their twisted motivations, but let’s be clear: there are no possible justifications for these attacks or any violence towards law enforcement,” he told reporters Friday morning in Warsaw, where he was attending a NATO summit meeting, after speaking by phone with Mayor Mike Rawlings of Dallas. “There has been a vicious, calculated and despicable attack on law enforcement.”
Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch, who was in Washington, said: “After the events of this week, Americans across our country are feeling a sense of helplessness, of uncertainty and of fear. Now, these feelings are understandable and they are justified. But the answer must not be violence. The answer is never violence.”
“To our brothers and sisters who wear the badge, I want you to know that I am deeply grateful for the difficult and dangerous work that you do every day to keep our streets safe and our nation secure,” she said. To the protesters, she said, “Do not be discouraged by those who would use your lawful actions as a cover for their heinous violence.”
The shootings, only a few blocks from Dealey Plaza, where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, hit one of the city’s busiest areas, filled with hotels, restaurants and government offices, effectively trapped hundreds of people indoors for much of the night. As shots boomed in quick succession between office towers illuminated by the flashing lights of police cars, bystanders captured extraordinary video of the shootout, with some officers taking shelter behind patrol cars and pillars, and tending to their fallen comrades.
After Mr. Johnson was cornered on the second floor of a parking garage, negotiators spent hours trying to get him to surrender, Chief Brown said, but he “told our negotiators that the end is coming and he’s going to hurt and kill more of us, meaning law enforcement, and that there are bombs all over the place in this garage and downtown.”
GRAPHIC
How the Attack on the Dallas Police Unfolded
Five officers were killed and seven others were shot during a protest in downtown Dallas.
“The negotiations broke down, and we had an exchange of gunfire with the suspect,” the chief said. “We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was.”
The three other suspects were a woman who was taken from the garage and two others who were taken in for questioning after a traffic stop, but they were not providing much information, the chief said.
“We just are not getting the cooperation we’d like, to know that answer of why, the motivation, who they are,” he said. They “planned to injure and kill as many law enforcement officers as they could.”
The police said that four of the dead were Dallas police officers and that one was from the Dallas Area Rapid Transit force. The transit agency identified him as Brent Thompson, 43. He joined in 2009 and was the first DART officer to be killed in the line of duty.
Another of the officers killed was identified by his family, on social media, as Patrick Zamarripa. “Need prayers to get through this,” Mr. Zamarripa’s father, Rick Zamarripa, said in a Facebook post from Parkland Hospital on Friday.
“We’re hurting,” Chief Brown said at a midday prayer service on Friday that was attended by hundreds of people. “We need this community to show officers that we appreciate their sacrifice.”
He said Dallas officers would “need counseling for a very long time” and pledged not to let the murders “steal our democracy from us.”
Mr. Johnson served as a private in the Army Reserve from March 2009 to April 2015, according to records released by the Pentagon. He was listed as a carpentry and masonry specialist, assigned to the 420th Engineer Brigade, and served in Afghanistan from November 2013 to July 2014.
Jane E. Bishkin, a Dallas lawyer who represents five of the wounded officers, said they were expected to recover, but that one of the five, a woman, had suffered a serious injury to her left arm and might be disabled as a result.
The area remained off-limits to civilians through the day Friday, as investigators combed through a crime scene that stretched for blocks.
Chief Brown said it was too early in the investigation to say whether there was any connection between the gunman and the demonstration. He suggested that whoever was involved had some knowledge of the march route.
<button class="button comments-button theme-speech-bubble-large" data-skip-to-para-id=""></button>“How would you know to post up there?” he said. “So we’re leaving every motive on the table of how this happened and why this happened.” He added, “We have yet to determine whether or not there was some complicity with the planning of this, but we will be pursuing that.”
Jeff Hood, a minister who took part in the march, said he had seen two officers felled by gunfire.
“I grabbed my shirt because I was close enough, I thought I might have been shot,” he said. “I was screaming, `Run, run!’”
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