The rally had been organized in a hurry. In just 24 hours the call had gone out: assemble at Belo Garden Park off Main Street in downtown Dallas on Thursday evening to express your feelings about the succession of police shootings of black men.
And so they assembled, in anger, yes, and in protest. “Black lives matter!” they chanted, picking up the slogan that had been coined after the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and had been repeated like a macabre mantra through so many other tragedies, including the still raw deaths at police hands of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on Tuesday and Philando Castile, shot four times in the chest after a routine traffic stop in St Paul, Minnesota, just a day later.
Anger, yes. “Enough is enough!” the protesters shouted, as they gathered from 7pm on a balmy Dallas night to hear speeches by pastors and community leaders demanding an end to the bloodletting.
“We wanted to create a space where anger could be let out, where people could grieve, to face head-on the problem of police brutality in our country,” said one of the organizers of the march, Dr Jeff Hood, a pastor. He hoped that his presence as a white activist, alongside leaders of the mainly black-led Next Generation Action Network, would send out positive signals that they intended to unite rather than divide.
Anger, yes. But peaceful anger. As the crowd of about 800 protesters began to move off in a march down Commerce Street and then Main Street, some time after 8pm, they were accompanied by scores of police officers and Dart transit police, but only as security. “The rally was non–violent. There was never a moment that there was a hint of violence,” Hood said.
Some protesters even stopped to take selfies of themselves standing beside a police officer. “The cops were peaceful,” Carlos Harris told the Dallas Morning News. “They were taking pictures with us and everything.”
The protesters marched on, bearing their placards that said “Stop Killing Us” and wearing T-shirts proclaiming “Black and proud”. They didn’t know that they were marching towards what would soon become the largest taking of police life since 9/11.
At around 8.45pm the front of the march had reached the corner of Main Street and Lamar in the West End of downtown Dallas, and people were starting to disperse to go home. They were just a few blocks away from Dealey Plaza, the spot where John F Kennedy was assassinated by a sniper, operating at elevation, in 1963.
That’s when another sniper, similarly operating at elevation, began his bloody work.
“Bah bah bah bah bah,” was how Hood described the sudden blast of gunfire. Moments earlier he had been walking alongside a police sergeant, talking to him in friendship about how great and how non-violent the event had been.
“Active shooter! Active shooter!” Hood screamed as he ran from the sound of the shooting, leaving the police sergeant to scramble in the opposite direction. On amateur videothat precise moment was captured as the crowd scattered like leaves in a powerful gust of wind.
“I heard a shot and all of a sudden people are running ... children everywhere, everything,” said Bianca Avery.
“Everybody just stopped – ‘Run, run for your lives!’,” said another of the marchers, Richard Adams. “Women with children and babies and everybody was chaotically running.”
“I saw a lot of it,” Olinka Green, a well-known Dallas activist who was one of the speakers at the rally, posted on Facebook. “I saw a lot of our people, some of them with babies, running everywhere, screaming, praying, crying. I’m horrified and traumatized.”
Michael Bautista took cover behind a tree. With the bravery – or foolhardiness – that possesses so many smartphone-wielding witnesses to tragedy in the modern age, he grabbed extraordinary footage of the carnage unfolding. “Holy shit!” you can hear him splutter on the video posted to his Facebook page.
Like a chorus, you hear him proclaim “Holy shit!” multiple times, and between each outburst there is the unmistakable, brutal sound of gunshots. Over and over and over. Five shots, then a pause. “Holy shit!” Four shots, then another pause. “Holy shit!” And on…
In Bautista’s film, police officers are visibly carrying handguns, running towards the gunfire, crouching behind police cars, then running forward again under the deafening din of sirens that fills the air. As the Dallas police chief, David Brown, put it later: “You see video footage of them running towards gunfire from an elevated position with no chance to protect themselves, they put themselves in harm’s way to make sure citizens can get to a place of security. They literally risked their lives to protect our democracy.”
Police radio transmissions broadcast by CNN graphically conveyed the adrenaline-fueled chaos as hundreds of law enforcers descended on downtown Dallas:
“Assist officer. Shots fired. Code three. Officer down.”
“We’ve got a guy with a long rifle. We don’t know where the hell he is.”
“Parking garage.”
“Slow down! He’s in the damn building right there.”
“He’s in that building, we’re hearing shots from that building.”
“We’ve got to get [emergency vehicles] down here right now. Get them down here!”
“On the way.”
As shots continued to rain down on the heads of officers, confusion reined. A huge area of about 25 blocks of downtown, including the Bank of America building, the city’s tallest skyscraper, and the Dallas municipal court, were evacuated and cordoned off.
The civilian equivalent of fog of war fell over the area, as false leads were followed up and fears of multiple snipers operating in tandem spread like wildfire. Shortly before 11pm, Dallas police released an image of a black man who they said was a person of interest; he voluntarily appeared at a police station and was later released.
Soon after that two men were stopped in a Mercedes with darkened windows speeding on the interstate, one of them having been spotted carrying a camouflaged bag – but they too were soon dismissed as innocent.
Even more alarmingly, there were reports from police at the height of the catastrophe of there having been two shooters firing from above, apparently in tandem. Later reports suggested that three people had been arrested, including a woman, and that they were being uncooperative with police.
An ‘evil tragedy’
In the aftermath of the shooting, Dallas authorities did not recant that information.
At a vigil held at noon on Friday, Brown continued to talk in terms of a joint effort by multiple suspects. He said that the investigation into the perpetrators had “revealed it was a well-planned, well-thought-out evil tragedy by these suspects and we won’t rest until we bring everyone involved to justice”.
What intensified as the clock ticked was the image of one man acting out his own brand of hate. Initially shooting from high up, he was later caught on amateur video down at street level, where he appeared to have so much ammunition stuffed into his pockets that it could be seen spilling onto the sidewalk.
The sickening truth of what he was doing was revealed in another cellphone video that showed him dressed in a dark jacket carrying what looked like a handgun, running up to an officer taking cover behind a pillar. The footage appears to show him shoot at point-blank range.
Another eyewitness, Ismael Dejesus, told Fox News that he had seen the gunman shoot an officer multiple times. “It looked like an execution, honestly. He stood over him after he was already down and shot him three or four times.”
As time passed, the death toll rose, marked each time by a tweet from the Dallas Police Association. The last, and fifth, Twitter toll was released at 1.47am and said simply: “We just lost another. Officer down.”
By then, other police officers had already been engaging in a lengthy negotiation with the gunman, who on Friday morning was identified as Micah Johnson, 25, from Mesquite, Texas. The army said that he had served as an enlisted soldier with one tour of duty in Afghanistan, which perhaps explained the uncanny precision of his targeting of police officers and his ability to survive a counter-barrage for so long.
As he came under heavy fire, the shooter retreated to the second floor of the parking garage of El Centro college. Police had him cornered, and into the small hours of Friday morning kept him talking in the hope of bringing the crisis to an end.
While the siege was still ongoing, police told the media that Johnson told negotiators: “‘The end is coming’ and he’s going to hurt and kill more of us – meaning law enforcement – and that there are bombs all over the place in this garage and in downtown.” They didn’t take his words lightly, instigating a massive search for explosives that after several hours failed to produce any devices.
In the course of the standoff, Johnson told negotiators the words that the organizers of the Dallas march and supporters of Black Lives Matter across the country dreaded to hear. Brown, the police chief, delivered the chilling news later on Friday morning.
“The suspect said he was upset about Black Lives Matter,” Brown said. “The suspect said he was upset about the recent shootings, he was upset at white people. The suspect said he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.”
Negotiators managed to keep Johnson calm for some while, but in the end he snapped again and erupted into renewed gunfire. At that point, Brown said, the decision was taken to conclude the disaster in a thoroughly 21st-century way.
Police chiefs knew by then that they had lost five officers and were not prepared to take further casualties. So they sent in a robot of the sort normally used to defuse explosives, but in this case deployed to deliver one.
Carrying a bomb in its robotic arm, the robot was maneuvered close enough to the gunman to kill him when the charge detonated. “The suspect is deceased as a result of detonating the bomb,” Brown said.
The sci-fi ending brought to a close the grim drama, with the prevailing evidence swinging towards the likelihood that Johnson, who told negotiators he was affiliated to no organization, acted alone. Whatever his links to other individuals, he left in his wake unimaginable suffering.
The first of the dead law enforcers to be named was Brent Thompson, 43. A Dart transit police officer, the first of the force to be lost in the line of duty in this way, he had married a fellow Dart officer just two weeks ago.
In addition to the five dead, seven other law enforcerment officers were shot, an undisclosed number of whom are still receiving treatment at Dallas hospitals. Two civilians were also among the victims, including Shetamia Taylor, 37, who attended the march with her four sons who was shot through the right calf and was undergoing surgery on Friday.
As much of downtown Dallas remained in lockdown, everyone touched by the tragedy was left struggling to comprehend the darkest moment since the assassination at Dealey Plaza. Police chief Brown said he had been visiting with families of his dead officers.
“Pray for these families,” he told the country. “They are not having a good time trying to absorb this, trying to understand why, and they need your prayers.”
Potently analogous words were used by the white pastor and march organizer, Jeff Hood. “I’m asking why. Why, why is this happening? The only answer I know is that we have got to turn to love. We have got to stop shooting.”
