Posted on July 8, 2016

Dallas Police Ambush Suspect ‘Wanted to Kill White People’: Police Chief

F. Brinley Bruton et al., NBC News, July 8, 2016

A suspect who was killed by police after snipers shot 12 Dallas officers, five fatally, “wanted to kill white people, especially white officers,” police chief David Brown said.

The man was killed after authorities cornered him in a garage at El Centro Community College. After several hours of negotiations, lasting into the early hours of Friday morning, officials exchanged gunfire with the suspect and “saw no other option” but to kill him by detonating a bomb, Brown said.

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Brown said the suspect, who he would not identify, told a hostage negotiator that he was upset about the Black Lives Matter movement and the recent police shootings of black men elsewhere in the U.S.

“The suspect stated he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers,” Brown said. “The suspect stated that he was not affiliated with any groups and he stated that he did this alone.”

Nonetheless, officers took three other people into custody.

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The city’s downtown was in lockdown Friday after Thursday night’s ambush, which marked the deadliest day for law enforcement since Sept. 11, 2001.

Earlier, the suspect had told police negotiators that “the end is coming” and that “there are bombs all over the place in this garage and downtown,” Brown said.

President Barack Obama, who was in Poland for a NATO meeting, condemned the “vicious, callous and despicable attack.”

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The chaos started when at least two snipers fired from an elevated position on police officers minutes before 9 p.m. local time (10 p.m. ET), Brown said. He called it an “ambush-style” shooting.

“We believe that these suspects were positioning themselves in a way to triangulate on these officers from two different perches in garages in the downtown area, and planned to injure and kill as many law enforcement officers as they could,” he told a news conference earlier–noting that some victims were shot in the back.

Other suspects might still be at large. “We’re hopeful that we have got everybody, but we don’t know that for sure,” Rawlings told NBC’s TODAY.

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About 800 people were at the demonstration, and around 100 police officers were assigned to the event and the surrounding area. The shooting occurred after the demonstration ended and as a march was taking place just several blocks from Dealey Plaza, where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.

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The demonstration in Dallas was one of several held across the country Thursday over the police shootings of two black men, Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Tuesday and Philando Castile Wednesday in a St. Paul, Minnesota suburb.

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