Micah Xavier Johnson was 25, a former Army reservist from the Dallas suburb of Mesquite, when the authorities named him as the man responsible for the deaths of five police officers in downtown Dallas on the night of July 7, 2016. Four of the dead served with the Dallas Police Department. The fifth was an officer of the Dallas Area Rapid Transit police, the first in that agency's history to die in the line of duty. Nine other officers and two civilians were wounded. No day since September 11, 2001 had cost American law enforcement so many lives.
Johnson never faced a charge, a courtroom or a verdict. He was killed by police in Dallas on July 8, 2016, and the case against him was built after his death, by investigators who would never take it to trial. Within a day state and federal investigators had concluded that one man had acted alone, and nothing in the eighteen months of work that came after changed that conclusion. He had no criminal record. The legal proceedings the case did produce were about other people: a Dallas County grand jury that examined the conduct of the officers who ended his life and declined to charge them, and two federal lawsuits, brought by Dallas officers, that tried and failed to hold three of the largest internet companies in the country responsible for what he did.
Johnson graduated from high school in Mesquite, just east of Dallas. In March 2009, at 18, he enlisted in the United States Army Reserve, giving Mesquite as his home of record.
The Army trained him as a carpentry and masonry specialist. Throughout his time in uniform he belonged to the 420th Engineer Brigade, a Reserve formation based in Seagoville, a small city south of Mesquite, and served in one of its units, the 284th Engineer Company. He was still a private first class, the rank he held when he left the service six years later.
In November 2013 Johnson's unit deployed to Afghanistan. It spent most of its tour confined to its base, in a district that had seen heavy fighting in earlier years but was relatively quiet by the time the brigade arrived.
The deployment ended early for him. In May 2014 a fellow soldier filed a complaint against him with the Army. The Army began an internal investigation, assigned him a defense lawyer and took him off ordinary duty, assigning a noncommissioned officer to accompany him at all times. In July 2014 he was sent home to Texas with a recommendation from his chain of command that he be removed from the Army with an other-than-honorable discharge, a characterization that falls between honorable and dishonorable and can limit a veteran's benefits and bar re-enlistment.
In September 2014 Johnson signed paperwork agreeing to accept a less-than-honorable discharge, and the lawyer prepared the separation papers. Then the case went quiet.
The separation was never carried out as recommended. Johnson stayed in the Reserve until April 2015, and when he left, it was on terms nobody involved could later explain. His discharge form gave the reason as "completion of required active service" and marked his eligibility to re-enlist as not applicable. The short service summary the Army released in July 2016 listed his dates of service, his deployment from November 2013 to July 2014 and his awards, among them the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal, but it did not classify his discharge. His former lawyer said he had learned only afterward that the characterization was honorable and that he had never received final paperwork showing how the case had been resolved.
Six days after the deaths in Dallas, the Army announced that it was reviewing all of Johnson's service records. The review was to examine why a soldier recommended for removal under other-than-honorable conditions had left with an honorable characterization, and whether the misconduct allegations made against him in Afghanistan had been fully investigated at the time. The Army declined to answer questions about the case while the review went on, citing privacy law, and his former lawyer stopped discussing it, saying he was bound by an order not to.
On July 29, 2016, the Army released documents from its 2014 investigation, the inquiry that had contributed to his removal from Afghanistan and his departure from the service. Nothing in them pointed to a motive for what happened in Dallas two years later, and the outcome of the Army's own review of how his case was handled was never made public.
After he came back from Afghanistan, Johnson sought care from the Department of Veterans Affairs in Dallas, visiting its medical center three times, the last in September 2014. The records of those visits, released in August 2016 under the Freedom of Information Act, established no motive for what followed.
In May 2015 police in Richardson, a suburb north of Dallas, questioned him and three other men after a call about a suspicious person. He was not charged with anything. When his name became public fourteen months later, he still had no criminal record.
On the evening of Thursday, July 7, 2016, about 800 people marched through downtown Dallas in a peaceful protest over the deaths of two Black men in encounters with police earlier that week, Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota. Nearly 100 Dallas officers were assigned to the march, and DART officers worked alongside them as the crowd moved through the center of the city.
As the march was ending and demonstrators were making their way back to their cars, the attack began. Five officers were killed and eleven other people were wounded in the attack the authorities attribute to Johnson. Johnson was killed by police in Dallas on July 8, 2016.
Investigators said he was angered by recent killings of Black men by police officers. They found no link between him and any international or domestic terrorist organization, and the federal government said the same within a day.
Senior Corporal Lorne Bradley Ahrens had served with the Dallas Police Department for fourteen years and six months.
Officer Michael Leslie Krol had come from Michigan to join the Dallas force, and had served with it for eight years and ten months.
Sergeant Michael Joseph Smith was the longest-serving of the five, with twenty-six years and ten months on the Dallas force. He had served in the Army before he joined the department.
Officer Patricio Enrique Zamarripa, who went by Patrick, served in the Navy before he joined the Dallas Police Department, where he had served six years and six months.
Officer Brent Alan Thompson of the Dallas Area Rapid Transit Police Department had served as a Marine before he took up police work for the transit system, where he served thirteen years and four months.
The wounded numbered nine officers, from the Dallas police, the DART police and the community college district's own force, and two civilians. All of the wounded officers survived.
The first hours were confused. Officials at first believed that more than one person had taken part, and three people were taken into custody that night; investigators soon concluded that none of them was connected to the deaths, and none was ever charged.
By midday on Friday, July 8, investigators were working at Johnson's residence in Mesquite under a warrant. They carried away material the police later said showed he had been planning an attack, and by that afternoon state and federal officials were saying publicly that the deaths appeared to be the work of a single man who belonged to no group. The Army confirmed his service record the same day. The Dallas police led the criminal investigation, with federal agencies working alongside them; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives assisted, and the FBI took on the processing of the physical evidence.
Because Johnson was dead, there was no defendant to prosecute. The investigation existed to establish exactly what had happened and to answer the one legal question still open: whether the officers who ended his life had acted within the law. In Dallas County every death caused by police goes before a grand jury, and this one would too.
The work took a long time. Investigators went through thousands of hours of camera footage, including about 170 hours of body-camera video, and interviewed more than 240 people. Among them were the thirteen officers most directly involved in the decision and the actions that ended Johnson's life, each of whom gave an account to the detectives assigned to the case.
Six months after the deaths, in January 2017, the file was still open. The FBI was still processing evidence, and the Dallas detectives intended to review the bureau's results before sending the case to the office of the Dallas County District Attorney. Investigators had settled the central question early, that Johnson was the only person responsible, but other questions remained, and the department said little about them in public.
It released almost nothing while that work went on. News organizations asked under the Texas Public Information Act for the 911 calls, surveillance video, the medical examiner's reports and other records. The requests were refused on the ground that the investigation was still open, and the department asked the other agencies involved not to release their own records either. On the first anniversary, in July 2017, the department said it expected to hand its findings to the district attorney's office within days, with some evidence still being processed.
The district attorney's office took the findings to a Dallas County grand jury more than a year after the deaths. The case was presented, the district attorney said, to determine whether the force used by the police had been reasonable, as the county requires for every death at police hands.
On January 31, 2018, the grand jury declined to bring charges against any of the officers involved in Johnson's death. The decision ended an eighteen-month criminal investigation. The district attorney's office returned all of the investigative material to the Dallas Police Department. No court ever heard any evidence against Johnson himself, and no one else was ever charged in connection with the deaths of the five officers.
The only courts to examine what Johnson did were federal civil courts, and they came to the question sideways. In January 2017 a Dallas police officer who had been among the first responders that night, joined by another plaintiff, sued Twitter, Google and Facebook in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. The suit argued that the companies had given material support to Hamas, a designated foreign terrorist organization, by letting it use their platforms, and that Hamas propaganda had radicalized Johnson. It sought damages under the federal Anti-Terrorism Act, which gives a civil remedy to people injured by acts of international terrorism.
The court heard argument on September 22, 2017, and on December 4, 2017 it granted the companies' motion to dismiss. The plaintiffs, the court held, had not plausibly alleged any causal connection between Hamas and the deaths in Dallas, and it saw no additional facts they could plead to cure that. It found a second, independent ground as well: section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields online services from liability for content posted by others, barred most if not all of the claims against all three companies. On one narrow theory, that Google had shared advertising revenue with Hamas, the court left open whether section 230 applied, because the absent causal link was reason enough to dismiss. The action was dismissed with prejudice.
A second suit followed in 2019, in the Northern District of Texas. Its lead plaintiff was a Dallas police officer who had been wounded on July 7 and had needed surgery afterward. It made largely the same argument against the same three companies, relying on the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which Congress passed in September 2016, two months after the deaths in Dallas, and which for the first time allowed civil suits against anyone who aids and abets an act of international terrorism by knowingly giving substantial assistance. In December 2019 the district court dismissed the claims with prejudice, finding no sufficient link between Hamas's online activity and Johnson.
The plaintiffs appealed only the aiding-and-abetting claim. A three-judge panel took up the dismissal afresh, treating every fact in the complaint as true, and on June 16, 2021 the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed. An act of international terrorism, the court noted, must occur primarily outside the United States or transcend national boundaries, and this one did neither. Taking the plaintiffs' own allegations as true, it held that the deaths in Dallas were committed solely by Johnson, a lone individual acting entirely within the United States, and that Hamas had played no role in them and given him no assistance. Because Hamas had no part in the attack, the companies could not have knowingly and substantially assisted it. The plaintiffs had also argued that the district court applied the wrong causation test and that proximate cause, a looser standard, was enough. The appeals court rejected that too: even the looser test required Hamas to have played some role in the deaths, and on the plaintiffs' own account it had played none. Liking a few pages online and voicing sympathy for a foreign cause, the court held, did not tie Hamas or the companies to what happened in Dallas. The court's mandate issued on July 8, 2021, five years to the day after Johnson's death, and with it the last legal proceeding arising from the case came to an end.
Johnson was never tried, and nothing about his responsibility was ever tested in a criminal court. The attribution of the five deaths to him rests on the Dallas police investigation and on the conclusions of the state and federal agencies that worked with it, all of whom found that he acted alone. The Fifth Circuit's statement that he acted alone was made on the pleadings in a civil case, taking the plaintiffs' allegations as true, and was not a finding of guilt.
The early belief that more than one person took part did not survive the first day. Investigators concluded that Johnson was the only person responsible, and none of the people briefly detained that night was charged.
His Army record leaves a real gap. The removal his commanders recommended in 2014 was never carried out, the service summary released in 2016 did not classify his discharge, and his own former lawyer could not say how the case had been resolved. The Army announced a review of the records, but its findings were not made public.
The motive is known only through the investigators' account of what Johnson said.
March 2009: Johnson enlists in the U.S. Army Reserve at 18, after graduating from high school in Mesquite.
November 2013: Deploys to Afghanistan with the 420th Engineer Brigade.
May 2014: A fellow soldier files a complaint against him; the Army opens an investigation.
July 2014: He is sent home from Afghanistan with a recommendation for an other-than-honorable discharge.
September 2014: He signs paperwork agreeing to a less-than-honorable discharge; separation papers are prepared.
April 2015: Leaves the Army Reserve.
July 7, 2016: Five officers are killed and eleven other people wounded in downtown Dallas at the end of a peaceful march.
July 8, 2016: Johnson is killed by police in Dallas; investigators enter his residence in Mesquite under a warrant; officials say he appears to have acted alone.
July 13, 2016: The Army announces a review of his service records.
July 29, 2016: The Army releases documents from its 2014 investigation.
August 2016: His VA records are released under the Freedom of Information Act.
January 2017: The investigation remains open while the FBI processes evidence; a federal civil suit against Twitter, Google and Facebook is filed in California.
July 2017: Dallas police prepare to hand their findings to the Dallas County District Attorney.
December 4, 2017: The California federal court dismisses the first suit with prejudice.
January 31, 2018: A Dallas County grand jury declines to charge the officers involved in Johnson's death, ending the criminal investigation.
December 2019: A federal court in Dallas dismisses the second suit with prejudice.
June 16, 2021: The Fifth Circuit affirms, holding that the deaths were committed solely by Johnson.