Killer wrote about tactics in his journal
Dallas sniper used backyard as practice field
DALLAS — The gunman who killed five police officers here studied the “shoot-and-move” combat tactic that he apparently used, writing about it extensively in a journal that detectives are poring over, a senior local official said Saturday. He also is said to have practiced military exercises in his backyard.
Investigators found the “fairly voluminous” journal in the home of Micah Johnson, the sniper who shot at officers Thursday night in downtown Dallas, the official, Clay Jenkins, Dallas County’s chief executive, said in an interview. While the journal did not specifically lay out plans for that assault, he said, it showed how the gunman planned to adapt the combat tactic.
The journal described “what we call ‘shoot and move’ tactics — ways to fire on a target and then move quickly and get into position at another location to inflict more damage on targets without them being able to ascertain where the shots are coming from,” Jenkins said.
The tactic described reflects the approach Johnson used in Dallas, moving from one vantage point to another, leading police to believe at first that there were multiple gunmen.
“It’s talking not only about how to kill, but how to keep from being killed,” Jenkins said.
Neighbors have told investigators that Johnson, a 25-year-old Army Reserve veteran who served in Afghanistan, had an interest in weapons, and officials have said that a cache of arms, ammunition, bombmaking material and body armor were found in his home in Mesquite, a Dallas suburb. After the shooting, he was cornered by police, who eventually killed him early Friday.
Johnson served in an engineering brigade, but he would have had combat training. During the attack, which left five officers dead, and seven officers and two civilians wounded, he used a semiautomatic SKS rifle — an old Soviet design — and a high-capacity handgun.
“It appeared that he was an excellent marksman and was calmly shooting,” Jenkins said.
A large part of downtown Dallas remained closed Saturday as investigators began a second day of piecing together the details of the attack.