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Michah Johnson Death Photos Leaked: Dallas Shooting Suspect Images Allegedly Posted Online

By Heather Tooley
Published on: 16:28 PST, Jul 10, 2016

Death photos of Micah Xavier Johnson following the detonation of a remote-controlled robot may have been leaked on the internet.

According to the Daily Mail, images believed to be of the Dallas police shooter have surfaced.

The photos, which have been blurred in spots due to graphic content, show Micah Johnson laying on his side wearing an armored vest and military clothing in a pile of rubble. He is not missing any arms or legs as a result of the blast. A semi-automatic rifle was beside the suspect, the one that is believed he used Thursday night in the ambush against law enforcement. The black military veteran killed five white police officers and injured seven others in his murderous rampage. He was distraught over the deaths of two black men at the hands of white policemen in Minnesota and Louisiana last week.

Photos of Johnson were released on LiveLeak by an anonymous source.

Bryan Woolston, a U.S. Army explosives expert and technician, said that the blast scene and condition of the corpse were in line with what the aftermath would have looked like following the bomb tactic.

Woolston told the Daily Mail that Johnson would have likely been killed by “catastrophic” internal injuries. According to the report, the bomb expert has no reason to believe the images are fake.

“The most significant injuries would have resulted from the blast over pressure generated by the detonation,” Woolston said.

Catastrophic injuries would have caused “cardiac, respiratory, gastrointestinal organs and other soft tissue. These injuries alone could cause death,” Woolston said. This is due to the blast wave of pressure that would have been much higher than normal atmospheric pressure, he revealed.

The expert went on to explain that secondary injuries would have been from fragments originating from the blast.

“Additional injuries would have resulted from the secondary fragmentation created by the blast,” Woolston said. “But unlike an explosive device such as a hand grenade, that is designed to fragment, bare explosives have no casing and therefore do not have a primary fragmentation danger.

“There would be no shards of metal expelled from a block of C4 itself. The only fragments involved would be those introduced by the environment.

“Additional injuries may have been sustained resulting from the thermal properties of the blast, depending on the suspect’s proximity.”

Dallas police have declined to verify whether the death photos are of Micah Johnson.

Police chiefs relied on a Remotec robot that consisted of a claw and arm extension to detonate one pound of C4 plastic explosive near Johnson. Negotiations were breaking down when the decision was made to send in the robot. Authorities thought the Dallas shooting suspect was hiding behind a wall when he was cornered in a parking lot at El Centro College.

Remote-controlled robots were utilized before by the U.S. military to drive out IEDs during the Iraq conflict. It had never been a device police adopted to “take out” an armed suspect in an urban location, however.

Police chiefs in Dallas say the robot bomb was used as a “last resort” after talks with the shooter failed after four hours. Their main concern was not putting more officers’ lives at risk because further threats of violence from Johnson were made clear.

AOL News reported that Johnson was taunting officers during the talks — singing, laughing at them, and asking how many officers he had shot.

Dallas police chief David Brown said the the shooter had bigger plans to use violence against law enforcement.

Deputy Chief Rob Sherwin said: “The Dallas Police Department and the FBI have received media inquiries regarding photographs that are being circulated on the internet that are being depicted as crime scene photos from the incident where 5 police officers lost their lives on Thursday, July 7, 2016.

“The Dallas Police Department and FBI will not confirm that photographs being circulated are from the crime scene in downtown Dallas.”

[Photo by Ron Jenkins/Getty Images]

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