Micah Johnson, Gunman in Dallas, Honed Military Skills to a Deadly Conclusion
GARLAND, Tex. — There was a time when he was known as a well-mannered young man — a regular at his church and a pleasant presence on a tree-lined, suburban, multicultural street in a neighborhood called Camelot. He grew up to serve his country in Afghanistan.
But on Thursday night, 25-year-old Micah Johnson, an African-American, drove his car to a rally against police violence and began killing officers in downtown Dallas, hoping to single out the white ones. In the process, he also managed to bring his war back home, killing at least one fellow military veteran and heightening fears that the nation he had been deployed to protect overseas was now failing to address its growing racial divide at home.
The Dallas police remained on edge Saturday. In the late afternoon, officers drew their weapons and cleared an area near the back of their headquarters after a report of a suspicious person in a department parking garage. The agency later said that no one had been found.
In the past several days, as demonstrators jammed the streets in a number of American cities, protesting police violence, new details emerged about Mr. Johnson’s life. They revealed a young man who had returned in disgrace from his stint abroad in the Army Reserve, but then continued a training regimen of his own devising, conducting military-style exercises in his backyard and reportedly joining a gym that offered martial arts and weapons classes.
A Dallas County official also revealed Saturday that Mr. Johnson — who killed five officers and wounded seven others, as well as two civilians, before the police killed him with a robot-delivered explosive device — had kept an extensive journal and described a method of attack in which a gunman fired on a target and then quickly moved to another location to confuse an enemy.
Although it did not seem to be a precise plan for Mr. Johnson’s ambush, it was strikingly similar to the tactics he used.
Micah Johnson enlisted in the Army Reserve in 2009.
via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
“It’s talking not only about how to kill but how to keep from being killed,” said Clay Jenkins, Dallas County’s chief executive and director of homeland security and emergency management, who said he had not read the original journal but had reviewed summaries of it. “It shows that he’s well prepared.”
Mr. Johnson showed an affinity for radical black-power organizations on his Facebook page. Organizers of the Black Lives Matter network and others have denounced Mr. Johnson’s shooting spree. In a news conference on Saturday in Warsaw, President Obama said it was “very hard to untangle the motives” behind the shooting.
“As we’ve seen in a whole range of incidents with mass shooters, they are, by definition, troubled,” Mr. Obama said. “By definition, if you shoot people who pose no threat to you — strangers — you have a troubled mind. What triggers that, what feeds it, what sets it off, I’ll leave that to psychologists and people who study these kinds of incidents.”
On Saturday, Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said in a statement that Mr. Obama had called him to offer condolences. Mr. Abbott said he had thanked the president and reiterated the need for Americans to unite after the shooting.
Tensions remained high, however. In San Antonio, the police were investigating reports late Saturday that gunshots had been fired at their department’s headquarters, Chief William McManus said at a briefing.
Officers said that they heard gunshots hitting the building just before 10 p.m. and that “a number of shell casings” were recovered, Chief McManus said. There were no injuries
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