Dallas police chief endures a life of sorrows
Few people understand loss better than David Brown, the Dallas police chief who stood before television cameras and said, ‘‘We are heartbroken.’’
Even before five police officers were killed during the Black Lives Matter protest and seven other people wounded, Brown had become intimate with loss, pummelled by it, again and again, in his career and personal life.
Before this week, violence had already taken from him a former police partner, a brother, a son.
When Brown was named police chief in 2010, he entered the position with a reputation of being an intense and introspective leader, according to a Dallas Morning News profile, that quoted him as telling a friend, ‘‘You know, I’m a loner, man.’’ But if he was a quiet force, his personal pain was very public – and would become even more so after his 27-year-old son killed a police officer and another man before being fatally shot more than a dozen times.
At the time, in June 2010, Brown was only seven weeks into his new position as chief and again spoke of heartache, this time in a statement to his own officers.
‘‘The past few days have been very troubling and emotional for all of us,’’ he told his 3600-member department, according to an article by The Guardian. ‘‘My family has not only lost a son, but a fellow police officer and a private citizen lost their lives at the hands of our son. That hurts so deeply I cannot adequately express the sadness I feel inside my heart.’’
The girlfriend of Brown’s son had called police earlier that day to say he was having ‘‘a psychotic breakdown’’ and had hit her, according to media reports. Hours later, he shot 23-year-old Jeremy McMillian as he drove with his girlfriend and two children in Lancaster, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. When police officer Craig Shaw responded to the shooting, the younger Brown shot and killed him, too.
For his father, it was public pain for a private man – but not his first. When Brown married Dallas police sergeant Cedonia Brown in 1996, he had already seen two personal losses.
In August 1988, Brown was working in the physical evidence section when he responded to an officer-involved shooting, according to the Morning News. On the ground at the crime scene, Brown saw a familiar pair of glasses.
They belonged to his former partner, Walter Williams, a 47-yearold father of three who had been Brown’s classmate at the police academy.
‘‘When things like that happen, and you’re really close, you don’t believe it for the longest time,’’ Brown told the Morning News. ‘‘I really relate to all of those in-the-lineof-duty deaths [on a] much more personal level . . . you lose a partner, you just never get over it.’’ But the blows kept coming. In 1991, Brown’s younger brother Kelvin Brown was killed by drug dealers. He doesn’t talk much about the loss, but acknowledged that it remains a piece of him.
‘‘I can’t deny that’s a part of who I am,’’ Brown told the Morning News. ‘‘The families of victims, I know what they go through.’’ too many citizens. Racial tensions have gotten worse, not better. This isn’t the American Dream we all want for our children.’’
Obama had reprimanded police on Friday after video footage emerged of the deaths of Philando Castile, who was shot by an officer in Minnesota, and Alton Sterling, a black man who was shot dead by police in Louisiana.
Obama said: ‘‘There’s a big chunk of our citizenry that feels as if, because of the colour of their skin, they are not being treated the same, and that hurts.’’
But even as the president was speaking, Micah Xavier Johnson, a 25-year-old black man, was preparing to unleash hell on the streets of Dallas.