Dallas suspect taunted cops during 2 hours of negotiation

Associated Press

DALLAS

The suspect in the deadly attack on Dallas police taunted authorities during two hours of negotiations, laughing at them, singing and at one point asking how many officers he had shot, the police chief said Sunday.

The chief and the county’s most senior elected official also said Micah Johnson had larger attack plans and possessed enough explosive material to inflict far greater harm.

“We’re convinced that this suspect had other plans and thought that what he was doing was righteous and believed that he was going to target law enforcement – make us pay for what he sees as law enforcement’s efforts to punish people of color,” Brown told CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Johnson, a black Army veteran, insisted on speaking with a black negotiator and wrote in blood on the wall of a parking garage where police cornered and later killed him, Brown said.

The gunman wrote the letters “RB” and other markings, but the meaning was unclear. Investigators are trying to decipher the writing by looking through evidence from Johnson’s suburban Dallas home, Brown said.

The writing suggested that Johnson was wounded in a shootout with police. An autopsy will confirm exactly how many times he was hit, Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins said.

Authorities do not “have any independent report from an officer saying, ‘I think I hit him,”’ Jenkins said.

Dallas police said neither they nor the FBI would confirm that photographs circulating on the Internet were from the scene early Friday where police killed Johnson with a bomb.

The police chief defended the decision to kill Johnson with a bomb delivered by remote-controlled robot, saying negotiations went nowhere and that officers could not approach him without putting themselves in danger.

Brown said he became increasingly concerned that “at a split second, he would charge us and take out many more before we would kill him.”