Dallas shooter wrote messages in own blood, laughed at officers during standoff, police chief says

The shooter who killed five Dallas police officers and wounded others last week wrote messages on the wall in his own blood and openly laughed at responding officers shortly before he was killed, the city’s police chief said Sunday, adding that investigators still are working to determine exactly what those messages mean.

Dallas Police Chief David Brown told CNN’s “State of the Union” that Micah Johnson, who opened fire during a Black Lives Matter protest Thursday night and said he intended to kill white police officers, scrawled phrases on the wall of the building from which he carried out his attack.

“This killer obviously had some delusion,” Chief Brown said. “At the scene where he was killed, he wrote some lettering in blood on the walls, which leads us to believe he was wounded on the way up the stairwell to the second floor of the El Centro building, where we detonated the device to end the standoff. There was more lettering written in his own blood. We are trying to decipher that.”

Mr. Brown said the initials “RB” were written in blood in the wall, along with other lettering. He said authorities still are working to determine what those messages mean.

The police chief also said Johnson, 25, intended to carry out other attacks, including using homemade bombs to target police officers in what he viewed as payback for their unfair treatment of black Americans.

“We’re convinced this suspect had other plans and thought that what he was doing was righteous,” Chief Brown said.

Chief Brown also defended his decision to use a bomb-carrying robot to kill Johnson and end the violence. He said he felt he had little choice after negotiations with the shooter — who would only talk to a black police negotiator — went nowhere.

“He was just basically lying to us, playing games, singing, asking how many did he get, saying he wanted to kill some more and there were bombs there,” Chief Brown said. “There was no progress on the negotiation.”

The chief also said he personally approved using the robot to end the incident and added, “I’ll do it again if presented with the same circumstances.”