New book tells the story of how Dallas SWAT cornered and killed the July 7 police shooter

Related Articles

City of Fort Worth spending millions to resolve pair of whistleblower lawsuits

50 mins ago

Dallas council member calls public safety meeting to address recent violence

50 mins ago

Gas station employees say they are lucky to be alive after someone sets their store on fire

51 mins ago

Tragedy moved into the neighborhood a long time ago and never really left. In 1910, Allen Brooks, a 65-year-old Black man, was lynched in broad daylight in downtown Dallas. The crowd that gathered to watch him die swelled to an estimated 5,000. More than half a century later, on Nov. 22, 1963, a sniper firing a bolt-action rifle from a sixth-floor window on Elm Street assassinated President John F. Kennedy. And more than half a century after that came the next big event — on July 7, 2016.

During a march for racial justice in the wake of police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, two Black men, yet another sniper gunned down five people in Dallas. This time, however, the victims wore the blue of the Dallas Police Department and the DART police. Their deaths led to a nationally televised memorial service at the Meyerson Symphony Center, where the speakers included then-President Barack Obama and former President George W. Bush.

And now, in 2020, during a truly bizarre year, defined by a pandemic and a shocking new wave of police killings of Black people leading to protests around the world, we have a reminder, in the form of a new book, of what unfolded in downtown Dallas on a summer night four years ago.

Jamie Thompson’s Standoff is a fine and powerful narrative of how, in her words, a small group of elite cops geared up and got the shooter. As Thompson wrote earlier in an award-winning story for The Dallas Morning News: “This is the first full account of what happened inside El Centro College that night. It is based on documents, photographs and dozens of hours of interviews with the police officers who tracked down the gunman, engaged him in a fierce gun battle, negotiated with him and meticulously planned and carried out his death.” A bomb-carrying robot was what finally took him down.

Thompson is a 44-year-old journalist whose debut book arrives at a time when she is, by necessity, home-schooling her two children, 10 and 12, because of the ongoing quarantine. She’s married to Steve Thompson, an investigative reporter for The Washington Post, who once worked at The News.

She has been a contributing editor for D Magazine whose work has also appeared in Texas Monthly. She and her family now make their home in Bethesda, Md.

She covered the Dallas police shootings for The Washington Post and became so mesmerized she felt compelled to dig deeper. The official publication date of Standoff is Tuesday, when it makes its debut under the banner of a major publisher, Henry Holt and Company.

“With every interview, there were more questions,” Thompson says. “I just never lost interest in it. It’s obviously a dramatic story. And I think that’s what drew me to it initially. But what kept me there were the characters, the people. It’s this really thoughtful cast of people, and they’re different. Men and women. Different races. Different socioeconomic backgrounds.

“So, you’re focused on this one event, but when you really start talking to them, you get this composite picture of all sides of this very traumatic debate we’re still having and have always been having in this country about race.”

Standoff arrives at a time when Black Lives Matter is a worldwide movement, when pro basketball and Major League Baseball teams have at times refused to play because police violence never seems to stop. And because of what happened in 2016, Dallas has its own place at the center of the issue. The latest flashpoint came in May, when demonstrators filled the city’s streets soon after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.

Thompson checked in with her sources during the George Floyd protests in Dallas, and what she heard was “brokenness. A lot of brokenness among all kinds of people, who still weep when they talk about what happened in 2016, who drink mimosas at 9 a.m. so that they can talk about it.”

The brokenness includes the lasting grief of the parents of Brent Thompson, a DART cop killed in 2016. “My mind turns immediately to his family and to the widows that continue to struggle.”

In addition to DART officer Thompson, 43, the other four victims were Dallas Police Senior Cpl. Lorne Ahrens, 48; Officer Michael Krol, 40; Sgt. Michael Smith, 55; and Officer Patricio “Patrick” Zamarripa, 32.

As with any good book, Standoff brims with strong characters. One of the more compellingly drawn is Larry Gordon, a crisis negotiator tasked with talking to the sniper, Army Reserve Afghan War veteran Micah Xavier Johnson, who was angry over the killings of Black people by police and told authorities he “wanted to kill white people, especially white officers.” In Standoff, Gordon’s words and his personality, based on police transcripts and military records, take on a chilling persona.

Thompson burrows deep inside Gordon’s world to make clear the psychology of negotiating with a murderer. It’s a profile so effectively rendered that it’s not hard to see, say, Denzel Washington playing Gordon in a movie version of Standoff.

Is Larry Gordon the soul of the book?

Thompson says yes, “story structure-wise, he ends up being the main character, because he’s there for most of the action. He stands in these two worlds of Black man and police officer. I think he brings so much nuance and depth to that conversation, just the way he sees people, the way he sees the world.”

Gordon sings Thompson’s praises, saying, “I think she did a great job. The writing was great, very descriptive, and the most important thing was that it’s very honest. The book is very honest. And there wasn’t any slant to it. It was also very, very accurate.”

Despite the intensity of his job, Gordon brings to the work a cool sense of humor. Asked about the fantasy of Denzel Washington playing him in a possible movie, he doesn’t miss a beat.

“I need a better-looking guy to play me,” he says deadpan. And then he laughs.

As with all good narratives, Standoff relies heavily on detail, which feeds an ongoing sense of surprise. Thompson began her reporting soon after the event occurred, but the process of winnowing out all that detail took three long years.

Now, in the wake of so many tragedies — 2020 alone has claimed the lives of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd — Thompson feels “amazed by how little we talk about training, specifically, in this entire debate. The nation is locked in this very emotional dialogue, and yet,” she believes, “there are a lot of very specific things we could be doing with police officers to address these concerns.”

And then there’s Dallas, which the author calls “one of those places that gets stereotyped. I was drawn to this book, because you get such a feel for this community of people in Dallas and how they see these issues, how race plays out in their own lives, in very compelling ways. That you can be in Dallas and have such a rich array of perspectives from really thoughtful people.”

In 2016, it was a city “with a Black police chief. The lead negotiator that night was Black. One of the trauma surgeons at the hospital who operated on the fallen officers is Black. You have a lot of female cops in the book. It’s really a place of rich, complex diversity.”

Of course, much of what makes Standoff so prescient is how the issues it documents have morphed from bad to worse in 2020.

“It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about,” Thompson says. “My hope is that this book helps take us beyond these polarized conversations we’ve been having. If we can start thinking about the real people behind these stories, then we will approach these conversations with more understanding. It’s intended to be a journalistic account of this one night.

“My hope is that it will add to the conversation — that you look at this one incident and see how much we all can learn from it.”