Dallas gunman changed after army service, says family

Micah Johnson, the gunman who killed five police officers in Dallas, showed a noticeable change in behaviour after being discharged from the US army last year.

Speaking for the first time since last Thursday's attack, his mother Delphine Johnson said her son's six years in the military and a seven-month tour of duty in the Afghanistan war turned the 25-year-old former army reservist into a "hermit" and someone who resented the government.

"The military was not what Micah thought it would be," Ms Johnson (49) told media outlet, The Blaze.

“He was very disappointed, very disappointed. But it may be that the ideal that he thought of our government, what he thought the military represented, it just didn’t live up to his expectations.”

James Johnson (55), the gunman’s father, said in the joint interview, sitting alongside his former wife and with his current wife on the other side, that his son began studying black history after leaving the military last year.

Emotions

“I don’t know what to say to anybody to make anything better. I didn’t see it coming,” said Mr Johnson, struggling to deal with his emotions as he spoke.

“I love my son with all my heart. I hate what he did.”

The gunman told police before he was killed in an explosion detonated by police with a "bomb robot" that he carried out his attack at a Black Lives Matter protest against last week's killings of black men in Minnesota and Louisiana because he was angry with those fatal police shootings and wanted to kill white police officers.

His Facebook page showed Johnson with his first in the air, a symbolic gesture associated with the Black Power movement of 1960s African- American activists and that he was interested in the New Black Panther Party, a militant group considered racist and anti-Semitic that believes in armed resistance against white society.

Johnson’s military lawyer said that his commanding officers sent him home from Afghanistan after a female soldier accused him of sexual harassment and suggested that he receive “mental help”.

The Daily Beast reported that Johnson was denied membership of an unidentified black activist group labelling him "unfit for recruitment" after discovering that he was thrown out of the army for sexual harassment.

The shootings in Dallas and protests about the policing of black Americans has dominated political debate and coverage of the presidential race.

A poll by Quinnipiac University found 61 per cent of respondents surveyed said the election campaign had increased hatred and prejudice. Of those people, 67 per cent blamed presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and 16 per cent Democrat Hillary Clinton.