Why did Dallas sniper Micah Johnson snap?
DALLAS — The sniper who gunned down five police officers was the grandson of a longtime pastor. His uncle is a respected high school teacher and Boy Scout leader. His mother helped start a Dallas-area church.
And Micah Johnson grew up wanting to be a cop. So what went wrong?
Delphene Johnson said her son came back from the war in Afghanistan in 2014 a different person. He went from being a fun-loving extrovert to acting withdrawn and reclusive, she told The Blaze, a conservative news outlet.
Dallas Police Chief David Brown admitted on Monday that it might never be fully known why the 25-year-old former Army reservist snapped.
“There are many questions in my mind,” the chief said. “Some of the questions we may not ever know the answer to. But we’re going to continue to ask ourselves the tough questions to make sure we don’t leave anything uninvestigated.”
What is known is that Johnson had been preparing for battle well before he launched a devastating ambush on police in downtown Dallas last Thursday. Investigators recovered explosives-making materials, ballistic vests, rifles, ammunition, and a combat manifesto at the suburban Dallas home he shared with his mother and younger brother.
“There was a large stockpile,” the chief said. “One of the bomb techs called me at home to describe his concern of how large a stockpile of bomb-making materials he had. According to that bomb tech, he knew what he was doing. This wasn’t some novice.”
Johnson’s mother said, “I didn’t see it coming.”
“I don’t know what to say to anybody to make anything better,” she told The Blaze. “I love my son with all my heart. I hate what he did.”
Johnson, armed with an assault-style rifle and a handgun, caught officers off guard when he opened fire from an upper tier of a downtown parking garage during a Black Lives Matter rally, police said.
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Officers cornered Johnson in a community college building, but he kept firing and told them he had explosives to “kill white people, especially white officers,” the chief said. Police ultimately killed Johnson by using a robot to detonate their own bomb in the area where he was hunkered down.
The tragedy is an enigma for the Johnson family, who said he grew up wanting to be a police officer and later became “gung-ho” about joining the U.S. Army.
“He loved his country,” his mother told The Blaze. “He wanted to protect his country.”
Johnson, according to military records, was a carpentry and masonry specialist in the Army Reserve from March 2009 until April 2015. He was deployed to Afghanistan in November 2013, which earned him a Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, among other awards.
Pentagon records do not reveal the reason for Johnson’s honorable discharge in April 2015, but a military lawyer who represented him said the Army took the unusual step of sending Johnson home from Afghanistan after he was accused of sexually harassing a female soldier.
“He was very much disliked by his command; that was clear,” lawyer Bradford Glendening told the Dallas Morning News.
Johnson set off on his path toward a military career in his teens and participated in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps in high school and enlisted in the Army Reserves after graduation in 2009.
He reportedly worked a number of odd jobs and took some community college classes before being deployed to Afghanistan. Most recently, he was an employee of Touch of Kindness, a social service agency that subcontracts with the state to provide care for people with disabilities. Johnson was paid to care for his younger brother at their home, owner Jeppi Carnegie told reporters.
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Delphene Johnson said her son never mentioned any specific traumatic incident, but his behavior was definitely different after returning from Afghanistan.
“The military was not what Micah thought it would be,” his mother told The Blaze. “He was very disappointed, very disappointed. But it may be that the ideal that he thought of our government, what he thought the military represented, it just didn’t live up to his expectations.”
The Johnson family has not responded to multiple messages from Yahoo News, including questions about whether Micah Johnson was ever diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder or another mental issue.
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings said the gunman had to have been in a “a very, very dark place.”
“He went and shot 12 officers and killed five of them. That is not the work of a mentally stable person,” Rawlings told Yahoo News. “I see a pattern of individuals that are like him in America — that hook their mental struggles on to some political purpose to justify what they do.”
Johnson appeared to embrace extremist movements’ views. On Facebook, he was a supporter of the New Black Panther Party, which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “a virulently racist and anti-Semitic organization whose leaders have encouraged violence against whites, Jews and law enforcement officers.”
In May, Johnson changed his Facebook cover photo to a red, black and green flag, a symbol of the pan-African black power movement. His profile photo was updated to show him wearing an African dashiki and giving a black power salute.
Johnson’s parents divorced when he was four. James Johnson, who is re-married to a white woman, said his son studied black history and was interested in his own heritage in recent years but never showed outward signs of animosity for any racial group.
What he did hate, his mother said, was “injustice.”
The country needs to do a better job of serving the mentally ill, the mayor said.
“We don’t make it easy for them,” Rawlings said. “We don’t make it politically correct to get help.”
Investigators are combing through Johnson’s computers and social accounts to see if he might have had accomplices or may have been motivated by anyone.
“That’s the blank in this paragraph that we’re trying to figure out,” the mayor said.
Jason Sickles is a national reporter for Yahoo News. Follow him on Twitter (@jasonsickles).
