Micah X benefited from social justice.
Two years before Micah Johnson gunned down five police officers in Dallas, an Army investigation into his service in Afghanistan revealed disquieting problems, including a grenade hidden in his barracks room.
The 2014 investigation stemmed from a female soldier’s complaint that he stole her underwear and sexually harassed her. The Army released a heavily redacted version of the investigative report Friday evening.
Johnson’s activities in Afghanistan have raised questions about his mental health and whether the Army acted appropriately during his service and when he returned home. A Mesquite police report obtained by The Dallas Morning News on Friday said Johnson was acting mentally unstable in 2011, before he deployed.
Friends and family have described a young man who came back from war withdrawn, isolated and fixated with guns. He went on to commit one of the deadliest attacks on law-enforcement officers in the last century.
The report released Friday adds new details to the portrait of a mass killer, noting that at least one of his fellow soldiers described him as a loner. And the allegations against him were serious enough that the Army took away his weapons.
But the 27-page document also leaves many questions unanswered, including what the investigator recommended and what steps, if any, Johnson’s commanders took after receiving the report.
The military investigator, whose name was not released, found that Johnson had stolen the underwear from the woman’s laundry bag. But that incident did not constitute sexual harassment under Army rules, he wrote.
Johnson’s comments and Facebook messages, however, “would be considered sexual harassment by the Reasonable Person Standard,” according to the report. The offending comments were redacted from the Army’s report.
After the investigation, Johnson was removed from his unit and functionally forced out of the Army, according to his former lawyer. But military records show he was not formally discharged and received an honorable release from active duty.
A spokeswoman for the Army wrote in an email that a review of Johnson’s records “has not identified any documented acts of violence.”
The female soldier who made the sexual harassment complaint referred questions about the report to her Army-appointed lawyer, who declined to comment, as did Gilbert Fischbach, an ex-Army sergeant who has recently served as her spokesman.
Johnson’s family could not be reached, and his former military lawyer said he could not comment and added in a recorded message that he was under investigation by the military for previously talking to the media.