The Dallas gunman who shot and killed five Dallas law-enforcement officers and injured several others taunted police during negotiations and seemed to have other plans, "possibly for a larger attack," Dallas Police Chief David Brown revealed in a Sunday Interview with CNN's State of the Union, the Washington Post reports.
The chief told the network that Micah Xavier Johnson was "determined to hurt more officers" and would have done so had the authorities not sent in a "robot bomb" to kill the 25-year-old.
"He just basically lied to us; playing games, laughing at us, singing, asking how many did he get and that he wanted to kill some more and that there were bombs there," Brown said, explaining that negotiations had broken down.
The chief said that "based on evidence of bomb-making materials and a journal" found in Johnson's Mesquite, Texas, home, "we’re convinced that this suspect had other plans” for what might have been a larger attack. Johnson, Brown said, "had been practicing explosive detonations," and possessed enough equipment to "have devastating effects throughout our city and our North Texas area."
Brown believes that the police-involved shooting deaths of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La., and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minn., may have led Johnson "to fast-track his plans," and unleash terror on what had been a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas.
Currently, Dallas investigators are working to figure out what Johnson meant by "RB," the letters he had written on the wall in blood just before his death, 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, on the second floor of the El Centro building, and where we detonated the device to end the standoff, there was more lettering written in his own blood," the police chief explained. “We’re trying to figure out . . . what those initials mean.”
In the CNN interview, Brown also attempted to explain how initial reports of three additional "suspects"—who were in fact not involved in the shooting—came about.
According to Brown, some 20 to 30 people, some of whom were wearing camouflage, turned up to the protest armed with AR-15 rifles and other gear, like gas masks, ammunition gear and bulletproof vests.
"Doesn't make sense to us," Brown said, "but that's their right in Texas."
However, when the shooting started, those individuals "began to run," marking them as suspects to law enforcement until their involvement could be ruled out.
Two of the three individuals apprehended were released, but one man was charged with a misdemeanor because he was not legally allowed to carry a gun, Brown said.
Read more at the Washington Post.