A lone gunman killed five police officers and wounded seven others at a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas on July 7, Thursday. "All of Me" hitmaker John Legend was one of the celebrities who took to Twitter to slam the killings.
Born John Roger Stephens in Springfield, Ohio, the Academy Award-wining singer-songwriter studied English with an emphasis on African-American literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He and his wife Chrissy Teigen, who is of Norwegian and Thai descent, have a daughter named Luna Simone Stephens.
In 2015, Teigen's husband won the Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures, Original Song at the Academy Awards for the "Selma" soundtrack "Glory," which he shared with Common. The film directed by Ava DuVernay chronicled Martin Luther King's campaign to secure equal voting rights through an epic march in 1965 from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.
On July 8, Friday, Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings confirmed what federal officials had told CNN that investigators determined Micah Xavier Johnson, 25, from Mesquite, Texas, was the lone shooter. The gunman served in the U.S. Army Reserve in Afghanistan from March 2009 to April 2015 is a military veteran who had served.
Johnson had no criminal record or known terror ties. The victims he killed were Dallas Police Officers Lorne Ahrens, Michael Smith, Michael Krol and Patrick Zamarripa and DART Police officer Brent Thompson.
The Dallas sniper attack was considered the deadliest single incident for U.S. law enforcement since the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda's attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania. It made President Barack Obama decide to cut his trip to Europe short by one day.
"Later in the week, at the White House, the President will continue the work to bring people together to support our police officers and communities," the White House said in a statement obtained by Washington Post. Obama wants to "find common ground by discussing policy ideas for addressing the persistent racial disparities in our criminal justice system," the statement added.
Watch a clip about the Dallas sniper attack here: