The man who went on a shooting rampage that killed five Dallas police officers and wounded nine other people was a former Army reservist who served a tour in Afghanistan, officials said Friday.
Police used a “bomb robot” early Friday to end an hours-long standoff in a downtown Dallas parking garage and kill the gunman, identified as Micah Xavier Johnson, 25, a Dallas-area resident who said he “wanted to kill white people,” officials said.
Those injured in the attack included seven police officers and two civilians.
It remains unclear whether Johnson was the only one involved in the ambush that broke out during a demonstration to protest recent police shootings of two African American men in Louisiana and Minnesota.
At least three other people were taken into custody in connection with the shooting Thursday night, but they have not been identified and no information has been given on their possible roles in the attack.
“This was a well planned, well thought-out, evil tragedy by these suspects .… We won’t rest until we bring everyone involved to justice,” Dallas Police Chief David Brown told reporters.
The end of the standoff with Johnson came after negotiations “broke down” and turned into “an exchange of gunfire with the suspect,” Brown said at an earlier news conference Friday morning. At one point, the gunman had told officials “the end is coming, and he’s going to hurt and kill more of us,” Brown said.
Johnson had no known criminal history or ties to terror groups, a U.S. law enforcement official said, and had relatives in Mesquite, Texas, just east of Dallas.
In his Facebook profile photo, Johnson wore a purple, yellow and gold dashiki and thrust his fist into the air. His cover photo displayed the red, black and green stripes of the Pan-African flag.
He had joined several groups that made allusions to the Black Panther Party, including a group called the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, named for the black power group’s co-founder. The group, which was founded last year to fight police brutality, teaches its members self-defense and conducts what it calls “armed patrols” through neighborhoods where the police have killed black men.
Military records provided by the Department of Defense say that Johnson served in the U.S. Army Reserve as a carpentry and masonry specialist from March 2009 to April 2015, including a tour in Afghanistan from November 2013 to July 2014 with the 420th Engineer Brigade.