An Army veteran killed by Dallas police after he fatally shot five officers amassed a personal arsenal at his suburban home, including bomb-making materials, bulletproof vests, rifles, ammunition and a journal of combat tactics, authorities said on Friday.
The man identified as 25-year-old Micah Johnson told authorities he was upset about the fatal police shootings of two African-American men earlier this week and wanted to exterminate whites, “especially white officers”, officials said.
In Georgia, Missouri and Tennessee, authorities said gun-wielding civilians also shot officers in individual attacks that came after the African-American men were killed in Louisiana and Minnesota. Two officers were wounded, one critically.
President Barack Obama and Texas Governor Greg Abbott asked for the public’s prayers. In a letter posted online Friday, Mr. Abbott said “every life matters” and urged Texans to come together.
“In the end,” he wrote, “evil always fails”.
Johnson was a private first class from the Dallas suburb of Mesquite 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.
A military lawyer says Johnson was accused of sexual harassment by a female soldier when he served in the Army in Afghanistan in May 2014. Lawyer Bradford Glendening, who represented Johnson, said Johnson was sent back to the U.S. with the recommendation he be removed from the Army with an “other than honourable” discharge.
Mr. Glendening said Johnson was set to be removed from the Army in September 2014 because of the incident. Instead, Johnson got an honourable discharge the following April for reasons Mr. Glendening doesn’t understand.
After the attack, he tried to take refuge in a parking garage and exchanged gunfire with police, Dallas Police chief David Brown said.
The suspect described his motive during negotiations and said he acted alone and was not affiliated with any groups, Mr. Brown said.
The bloodshed unfolded just a few blocks from where President John F. Kennedy was slain in 1963.
The shooting began on Thursday evening while hundreds of people were gathered to protest the killings in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and suburban St. Paul, Minnesota. Mr. Brown told reporters that snipers fired “ambush-style” on the officers. Two civilians were also wounded.
Authorities initially blamed multiple “snipers” for Thursday’s attack, and at one point said three suspects were in custody. But by Friday afternoon, all attention focused on Johnson, and State and federal officials said the entire attack appeared to be the work of a single gunman.
With the lone shooter dead, Mayor Mike Rawlings declared that the city was safe and “we can move on to healing.” He said the gunman wore a protective vest and used an AR-15 rifle, a weapon similar to the one fired last month in the attack on an Orlando, Florida, nightclub that killed 49 people.
When the gunfire began, the mayor said, about 20 people in the crowd were carrying rifles and wearing protective equipment. That raised early concerns that they might have been involved. But after conducting interviews, investigators concluded all the shots came from the same attacker.
In Washington, the nation’s top law enforcement official, Attorney-General Loretta Lynch, called for calm, saying the recent violence can’t be allowed to “precipitate a new normal”.
Ms. Lynch said protesters concerned about killings by police should not be discouraged “by those who use your lawful actions as a cover for their heinous violence”.
The other attacks on police included a Georgia man who authorities said called 911 to report a break-in, then ambushed the officer who came to investigate. That sparked a shootout in which both the officer and suspect were wounded but expected to survive.
In suburban St. Louis, a motorist shot an officer at least once as the officer walked back to his car during a traffic stop, police said. The officer was hospitalized in critical condition.
And in Tennessee, a man accused of shooting indiscriminately at passing cars and police on a highway told investigators he was angry about police violence against African-Americans, authorities said.
