Dallas police attack: gunman confirmed dead hours after opening fire on HQ Read more

The man linked to a violent assault on Dallas police headquarters on Saturday was accused two years earlier of choking his mother, then fleeing to an east Texas town where schools were locked down out of fear he would attack them as “soft targets”, according to accounts from police and family members.

Police said the suspect, who planted pipe bombs outside headquarters and fired at officers from his armoured van, told them he was James Boulware. He was killed hours later by a police sniper. On Sunday afternoon, the medical examiner had not officially confirmed the man’s identity.

In interviews, Boulware’s father recalled his son’s seething anger at police after losing custody of his child, and his brother recalled that the family’s attempts to get Boulware help were rebuffed.

“We had tried for two years,” his brother, Andrew Boulware, said on Sunday. “I didn’t honestly think that he would ever go this far, but it was always in the back of my mind that it was a possibility.”

Authorities say it was miraculous no one else was injured in Saturday’s attack, in which the gunman sprayed the front of the building with gunfire just after midnight. After opening fire, the suspect drove the armoured van into a squad car, still firing, then led police on a chase to a restaurant parking lot in the suburb of Hutchins. The police sniper shot him during the standoff, but it took several hours to confirm his death, out of fear that he had loaded his van with more explosives.

Boulware was arrested for family violence in Dallas two years ago, in a case that was later dismissed. According to a Dallas police report, a witness said Boulware was in his mother’s house and “began talking rudely about religion, Jews and Christians”. The report said Boulware then grabbed his mother by the neck for two to three seconds, until a third person could pull him off. The two men fought until Boulware left the house.

The police report said he was then reported on the same day to be in Paris, Texas, about 100 miles away, where he grabbed weapons and body armour and talked about “shooting up schools and churches”. Andrew Boulware and his father, Jim, confirmed the incident.

Andrew Boulware accused authorities in Dallas of ignoring family members’ statements that James was mentally unstable.

“They diagnosed him as sane in 15 minutes,” he said.

Andrew Boulware remembered James claiming that he had dreamed about the December 2012 school shootings in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, and other disasters before they had happened. He also remembers pleading with his brother to get medical help, and going to a local official but being ignored.

“He never was properly diagnosed,” Andrew Boulware said. “He could be the nicest guy in the world. He tried to help friends out whenever he could. He was not a bitter person.”

His mother, Jeannine Howard, said in a statement to local media she considered her son “lost to mental health” long before his death.

“We tried to get him mental help numerous times, but the system failed him, because he was declared ‘sane’,” she said in the statement. “He was very delusional. It was very obvious.

“We hope something good can come from this, and that people will reach out to hurting souls around them and unite to build up others, rather than tearing them down. We hope that people with mental illness will receive the care they need to avoid situations like this in the future.”

Boulware lost custody of his son, something that his father, Jim, said weighed on him deeply and caused him to distrust police.

The day before the shooting, Boulware spent several hours at his father’s home in the Dallas suburb of Carrollton. He was talking about the armored van he had just purchased days earlier, having taken a bus to Georgia to pick it up and drive it back.

He also talked about the police, including his reaction to a widely watched video of a white police officer in McKinney, Texas, pushing down a black teenage girl at a pool party.

“He made statements while he was here that the police are the ones that took his son away from him,” Jim Boulware said.

But Jim Boulware said he didn’t know what was to come. His son left the house that day suggesting he was driving out to west Texas and planning to sleep in the van.

Andrew Boulware said he had not seen his brother in more than two years. He remembered James Boulware living in a home in Paris without electricity and said he tried to help him, but was rebuffed.

“I went back out there after he got released and I brought him a box of food, and he said, ‘Get off my property,’ and so I did,” Andrew Boulware said. “I tried to call him three or four times after that, but he never did answer.”