"Lone Wolf Details"Known to many by his middle name Xavier, or the nickname X, Johnson grew up in Mesquite, a middle-class suburb of Dallas, living with his his mother Delphene in a four-bedroom, $220,000 detached house next to a large field. It was an All-American neighbourhood with pick-up trucks and basketball hoops in the drives.The white family next door would sell cookies for the Girl Scouts and Johnson would pop round to buy them.
In 1996 his mother and father, James Odell Johnson, divorced in 1996 when he was aged four. His father remarried Donna Ferrier, a bespectacled teacher, who is white. They moved to a similar suburb an hour away while Johnson continued living with his mother, sister Nicole and brother Tevin. If there was animosity over the divorce it did not show. Johnson's stepmother appeared proud of his decision to join the Army, posting pictures of him in uniform on her Facebook page. She and Johnson's father were part of the local neighbourhood watch group and well liked by neighbours.
As a child at John Horn High School in Mesquite the gunman had been an enthusiastic member of the Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps and loved basketball. Friends from that era described him as "fun-loving and goofy" and "a sweet-hearted joker". When he graduated in 2009 he joined the Amy Reserve serving in the 420th Engineer Brigade based at Seagoville, Texas where he became a carpentry and masonry specialist.
He underwent basic weapons training but was described by one fellow serviceman as a "terrible shot".His civilian jobs included working at a truck plant and in a sandwich shop called Jimmy John's. In November 2013 Johnson was deployed to Bagram air base in Afghanistan. His job would have involved him in construction work on the base and
there was no record of him being in a combat role, although there were photographs of him in military vehicles.
While serving in Afghanistan he was accused of sexual harassment. The female accuser sought a protective order against him "for myself, my family, home, restaurant and any other place of residence I may reside". She also told superiors Johnson needed "mental help".
In a complaint she said Johnson's conduct had included buying her Victoria's Secret underwear unsolicited. Bradford Glendening, a Texas-based lawyer who represented Johnson in the case, said: "I'm sure he created a hostile work environment by being sexually forward with her. She said she wanted him to seek mental help for behavioural health."
He said the Army sought to have Johnson discharged and it was clear his commander "didn't like him". Mr Glendening added: "I'm sure that this guy was the black sheep of his unit." He said Johnson's must have been "egregious" because sexual harassment was usually dealt with using counseling rather than sending someone home.
The alleged victim also lives in Dallas but it was not clear whether she knew Johnson before they were posted to Afghanistan. She declined to speak about her case, saying the "focus" should be on the victims of the mass shooting.
Wells Newsome, a soldier who served with Johnson at the time, later said: "We all knew he was a pervert because he got caught stealing girls' panties. But murdering cops is a different story. You really never know what someone is capable of until it’s too late."
When he returned home in July 2014 friends said Johnson had changed, seeming withdrawn and to have lost the Christian faith instilled in him by his church-going mother. According to one friend (who? anonymous friend?): "When he came back from Afghanistan he got in touch with some bad folks and went all Black Panther."
He began working for a group called Touch of Kindness teaching basic life skills to people, including children, with learning disabilities. At the same time he took up martial arts at a gym called the Academy of Combative Warrior Arts.
In May last year Johnson was reported to police as a "suspicious person" while he was sitting in a parked vehicle in a car park in Mesquite. According to a police report two officers were dispatched and spoke to him. Johnson told then he was waiting to meet his father. The officers spent 10 minutes questioning him, according to the report. It appeared to be the only time he had been stopped by police.
Several times a week Johnson would take a stroll down from his mother's house to Jay Thompson Elementary school for pick-up basketball games. Fellow players described him as "chilled and cool" but said he would occasionally begin talking about "equality for blacks," especially after a high profile police shooting. "We didn't really pay too much attention to him," Israel Cooper, 19, a fellow player told The Sunday Telegraph.
But that changed a week ago when he began ranting about white police. Johnson said he believed white police were "carrying out a "genocide" against black people. He told Mr Cooper: "White cops are slaying black people. This is getting out of hand.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/auckland/local-n ... er-JohnsonOthers didn't see it. Even after the theft of several of his guns from his mother's home, which Johnson reported to the police, his neighbour Jim Otwell recalled that in telling him about the theft, Johnson was "really mellow…a laid-back guy".
Jowanda Alexander, also a neighbour, told The Guardian of an encounter with Johnson when he complained about her daughter "messing with his mailbox". She said: "he didn't become aggressive, just real gentle [but] he seemed real nervous".
Back in Civvy Street,
Johnson worked for a time at a plant run by the aviation conglomerate General Dynamics.About this time, he was the target of a "suspicious person" complaint to the police, because he and four guys sat in a vehicle for about half-an-hour, on a shopping strip in Richardson, in Dallas' northern suburbs – he was interviewed by the police who took no action when he told them he was waiting to meet his father.
Early in 2015, he landed a job at Touch of Kindness, a privately run service agency that helped intellectually disabled adults and children.
Several times a week in the last two years, Johnson headed away from his mother's home to the nearby Jay Thompson Elementary School, where he, his buddy Israel Cooper and others played pick-up basketball. "He had good vibes," Cooper recalled, describing Johnson as "not very political" but "educated".
At times, Johnson was alone on the court. Cooper recalls: "He would be out there for eight hours…like it was his job. Just hoopin'".
Johnson didn't have much of a war in Afghanistan – reserve colleagues joked that even after training, he couldn't shoot straight. But by early in 2016, Johnson was steeped in the social media outpourings of extremist, separatist and militant movements. He embraced their claim that police forces across the US were at war with African-Americans – and Micah Xavier Johnson was preparing himself to fight back.
He kept a low profile – he was not known among activists in the movement of the moment, Black Lives Matter.
But his Facebook page was a giveaway. The raised-fist salute and the red, black and green of the Pan-African flag adorned his home page and at the end of April, he switched his profile photo for an image of himself, shoulder to shoulder with Professor Griff, real name Richard Griffin, from the 1980s hip-hop group Public Enemy, whose lyrics challenge police brutality.
...
Johnson was busy on other fronts – building an arsenal, training to be able to shoot straight and pushing himself through rigorous sessions of military physical training.
He was compiling a dense combat manual on what is described as the "shoot and move" tactics of the US Navy SEALs' – how to kill at close quarters, without getting killed; and how to stay on the move, to confuse the targets on the location and strength of the enemy confronting them.
At his mother's home/b], he was stashing bomb-making materials, ballistic vests and ammunition.
Johnson enrolled at the Academy of Combative Warrior Arts, in Richardson, which boasts on the internet: "Reality is highly dynamic, you will be drawing your firearm, moving, shooting on the move, fixing malfunctions, etc. all under high levels of stress."
Offering "reality based training for today's urban environment", academy courses include "urban everyday carry and Improvised weapons" and "weapons defence".
And on the courts at the Jay Thompson Elementary School, the strength of feeling in Johnson's venting about the mistreatment of African-Americans by white cops alarmed his hoops buddy Israel Cooper. He was used to Johnson's low-level spiel, but now he declared the police were engaged in genocide – "White cops are slaying black people – this is getting out of hand".
...
[b]Stacey Brown, 30, was near Dealey Plaza, in which there is a monument Dallas' last moment of infamy – the assassination in 1963 of President John F Kennedy – when all hell broke loose. "I heard a shot and all of a sudden people are running ... children everywhere, everything."
Carlos Harris, a member of the US military living downtown, was struck by the strategic nature of gunfire – "It was tap, tap, pause. Tap, tap, pause". Such was the ferocity and seeming omnidirectional nature of the shooting that the police concluded there were up against two or more gunmen who, they said, were high in city buildings and "triangulating" their targeting for maximum impact.
It didn't help that Texas has open-carry gun laws, which meant that the police had observed as many as 20 people in the crowd dressed in camouflage and with guns slung on their shoulders – of course they ran; and of course the police gave chase, in the belief that they were perpetrators or co-conspirators.
But it was just Johnson. Watching, and video recording from his room in the Crown Plaza Hotel, Ismael Dejesus, explained as CNN ran his video – starting as Johnson leaps from the Chevy Tahoe SUV, he explained how he witnessed an execution: "Man had a rifle, AR-15, clear as day; pretty big magazine. And you can see towards the end of the video here, that he goes ahead and drops a few mags.
"He had multiple pockets, he had three to four pockets in front of his pants. He definitely looked like he was wearing something in his shirt. He got out of there, walked over to the pillar, put a magazine in and started firing."
Despite incoming from multiple police weapons, Johnson weaves through a hail of gunfire, circling around and behind one of the pillars to come at a crouching officer from behind – who he then murders callously, with multiple shots fired into his back at point blank range.
"It looked like an execution honestly. He stood over [the officer] after he was already down and shot him maybe three to four times in the back. It was very disturbing to watch."
Driving through the city, Robert Rodriguez, 30, spotted Johnson shooting at police from the hip – with the rifle. The cops were returning fire from two directions – some crouched by a wall and another officer who drove up in a patrol car, from which he leapt – gun blazing. But Johnson kept moving, kept shooting – he stayed cool; he wasn't injured.
The guy who couldn't shoot straight in Afghanistan, now was shooting very straight.
Reuters quoted a US Army officer: "The way he raises and lowers the rifle to his shoulder, apparently firing two rounds at a time, with discipline in his movements and use of cover, is what makes it seem as though he has military training."
With a dozen or more cops returning fire, Johnson retreated into El Centro, where the witness Ismael Dejesus' video captures him using the pillared entrance to the college as cover, while firing at cops who are closing in.
As Johnson enters and moves through college building, at times pausing to shoot through windows, some of the cops raced to the higher levels of surrounding buildings – hoping to get a bead on him.
It was 12.30am on Friday before Johnson was pinned down – on the second level of the college's parking garage. For a while the shooting stopped and the cops tried to negotiate Johnson's surrender.
But the gunman treated it as a bit of a joke – at one stage, even laughing and singing; and then explaining to the cops that he had been working-out in preparation for this show down with the law. They detected neither anxiety nor nervousness in him.
Johnson told them he was ready to die and that his objective had been to kill white people – especially white police officers.
He did manage to cause the police to pause in their planning, as they explained his options – one of which was for them to bomb him out of the garage, in which case he surely would die. Johnson parried with a claim that he had stashed improvised bombs in the building.
"The end is coming, and [I'm] going to hurt and kill more of [you]," he told them.
"He wanted to kill officers. And he expressed killing white people, killing white officers, he expressed anger for Black Lives Matter", city police chief David Brown recounted later.
Johnson revealed that he was a so-called lone wolf; he was not affiliated with any terrorist groups; and that he was driven to act by the police killings in Louisiana and Missouri.
After about an hour of talking, Johnson suddenly started shooting again – and kept it up for about 45 minutes. At 2.30am there was an explosion and then silence – carrying out his earlier threat, Brown the police chief had ordered a small bomb to be attached to a robotic vehicle, which was directed into the garage and then the device was detonated remotely in what was hailed as the first such use of a robot by a US police department.
Johnson's family and friends seemed genuinely shocked at what he had done.
"It's the quiet ones that do the most devastating stuff," his hoops buddy Cooper told a reporter. "You never see it coming. But then it's more expected, like 'I should have known'."Others genuinely wanted to know who he was – or, in the case of some of those he had "liked" on the internet, to disown him, quick smart.
Activists gathered near City Hall on Friday, said they did not recognise Johnson or his name; then had not seen him at earlier protests. March organiser Dominique Alexander said: "Never in our wildest dreams would we think our efforts to save lives would take lives".
At the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, reporters were told: "We'd never seen him and we don't know him – the gun club isn't affiliated with him in any way".
Same-same at the Academy of Combative Warrior Arts. Founder and chief instructor Justin Everman was quoted: "I don't know anything about Micah. I'm sorry. He's gone. He's old to us. I have thousands of people".
by 82_28 » Mon Jul 11, 2016 2:56 pm 
