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Ten Years After the Dallas Shooting: I’m Still There

Ten Years After the Dallas Shooting: I’m Still There

Last updated on: July 7, 2026 at 9:39 pm by Jeff Hood

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Ten Years After the Dallas Shooting: I’m Still There 2026-07-07T21:39:46-06:00 Jeff Hood

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Dallas Shooting

Ten years ago, I stood in the middle of a street in Dallas and watched the world come apart.

I still live on that street. I do not mean this as a figure of speech. A car backfires, and I am back on the pavement. A door slams in an empty church, and my body drops before my mind can tell it that there is no rifle. Ten years have not softened it. Trauma does not keep a calendar. It keeps you.

It began with two videos. Alton Sterling dead in Baton Rouge. Philando Castile bleeding out in Falcon Heights while the whole country watched. I could not get past the fact that they were murdered by the police. So, I organized a march on July 7, 2016. Over a thousand people answered the call. We moved through downtown Dallas in the softening evening light, children riding on their parents’ shoulders, signs rising over the crowd, chants rolling block to block off the high-rises. Officers walked beside us, some of them stopping to take photographs with protesters. We walked because we believed our voices mattered.

Before we walked, I spoke. I told the crowd I was channeling Jeremiah Wright, and then I said the words that have followed me for a decade. God damn white America. I meant it then. I mean it now. I was damning every system that decides some lives are worth less than others. I was damning every arrangement of power that lets a man bleed out on a livestream while the country argues about what he should have done differently. I have never repented of that sentence. I have only ever wished that I had said more.

We were almost done with the march.

Dallas Shooting: The Shots Never Stopped

Then came the gunfire.

I heard the shots ricochet off the high-rises, a sound I had never heard before and have never stopped hearing since. I grabbed my stomach, certain I had been hit. I turned my cross (ten feet tall) into a staff and swung it, screaming for people to run, and somewhere in that crush, I lost the person I love most and did not find her for three hours. I have witnessed a great deal of death in the years since. I had never before been that close to my own.

Five officers died that night. Lorne Ahrens. Michael Krol. Michael Smith. Brent Thompson. Patrick Zamarripa.

I remember sitting in the lobby of a television station after midnight, stunned into silence by the weight of those names. They had walked beside a protest against police violence. Some had smiled at marchers. Some had stopped for photographs. Then they were gone. Children woke the next morning without fathers. Families learned what a folded flag weighs. I have spent ten years refusing to let their deaths become evidence for anyone’s argument. Five men were murdered, and the grief of that fact has never loosened its grip on me.

The media onslaught after the shooting was overwhelming. From Good Morning America to the CBS Evening News, from the BBC to local stations and even Fox News, I kept saying the same thing. A madman had shattered a peaceful protest. What had happened was not our fault.

Honestly, it took me years to stop blaming myself for what happened.

Micah Johnson murdered them. I will not soften that verb. He positioned himself strategically and opened fire on a street full of families protesting the injustices of their government. The gunfire came in long bursts that didn’t stop. Officers went down mid-stride and did not get back up. Blood ran in the gutters of the street. Parents threw their bodies over their children behind whatever concrete they could find. People I had marched beside minutes earlier were screaming names into the dark and getting no answer. What he did was evil. No context redeems it. No grievance excuses it. He was an evil killer, and five families are broken forever because of what he chose to do.

Dallas Shooting: The Sixth Name

And then the state cornered him.

When Johnson wouldn’t surrender and negotiations broke down, Dallas police strapped a pound of explosives to a bomb-disposal robot, sent it down a corridor and detonated it. It was the first time in American history that a police department deliberately used a robot to kill a civilian. No trial. No jury. No verdict. Just a room full of frightened hurting people deciding another human being would die. People called it justice. People called it safety. People even celebrated. I could not.

Understand me. I am not saying Micah Johnson’s death and the deaths of those five officers are the same. They are not. He chose to murder. They chose to serve. But I am saying that when we strapped a bomb to a robot and blew a man apart because we had decided he no longer deserved to live, we crossed into the very territory we claim to abhor. We became the thing we were mourning. We answered killing with killing and told ourselves the arithmetic came out clean.

It never comes out clean. That is the whole of what I have learned in ten years.

Six human beings died in Dallas that night. Five were murdered by a rifle. One was killed by the state with an explosive carried by a robot. The causes were different. The moral responsibility was different. But every death declared that violence would have the final word, and every death left the image of God lying in the street. I say the sixth name out loud because almost no one else will. Not to excuse him. To refuse the lie that some killing is holy. The moment we start sorting the dead into the ones we grieve and the ones we cheer, we have already lost.

I Never Left Dallas

Every road I have walked since that night begins and ends on that street.

Every execution chamber. Every prison. Every death warrant. Every condemned man’s final prayer. I have never really left Dallas. I simply keep finding the same question in different rooms: Who has the authority to decide that another human being must die?

I have stood in execution chambers across this country. I have sat a few feet from men strapped to gurneys and held their gaze while the state…armed with paperwork, a warrant and a so-called protocol…killed them slowly. What’s the difference between that and a robot bomb in Dallas? I have watched them force nitrogen into the lungs of the condemned and I have watched the owners of those lungs heave in the straps. I have come to know the machinery of state killing more intimately than any person should. And every time, I am back on that Dallas street. Every time, I watch with horror as we erroneously decide once more that this death, this one, is the permissible one.

It never is. Murder is not a permissible construct. That is the prophetic word I have to speak, and I have been speaking it for ten years, and I will keep speaking it until I have no breath left. Stop killing people. Stop killing them in traffic stops. Stop killing them in parking garages. Stop killing them on gurneys behind glass. Stop deciding, in rooms full of frightened people with power, whose life has run out of worth. The state does not get to play God. The mob does not get to play God. I do not get to play God. No one does.

We have to stop killing each other. All of us. Everywhere. Without exception. Without the comforting math that says this death was tragedy and that death was justice. There is no such math. There is only the body in the street and the God who made it.

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About The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood

The Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood is a Catholic priest (Old Catholic), theologian, and nationally recognized activist based in North Little Rock, Arkansas. A spiritual advisor to death row inmates across the country, Dr. Hood has accompanied more people to their executions than any other advisor in the U.S., including the first-ever nitrogen hypoxia execution in 2024. His work sits at the intersection of justice, radical compassion, and public theology. Dr. Hood holds advanced degrees from Auburn, Emory, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, University of Alabama, Creighton, and Brite Divinity School, among others. He also earned a PhD in metaphysical theology and founded The New Theology School, where he serves as Dean and Professor of Prophetic Theology. Author of over 100 books—including the award-winning The Courage to Be Queer—Dr. Hood’s writings and activism have been featured in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, NPR, CNN, and more. A frequent collaborator with men on death row, he sees theology as a shared, liberative act. Dr. Hood has served on the leadership teams of organizations like the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty and the Fellowship of Reconciliation. His activism has earned multiple awards, including recognition from PFLAG and the Next Generation Action Network. On July 7, 2016, Dr. Hood led the Dallas protest against police brutality that ended in tragedy. His actions that night saved lives, and his story is now archived in the Dallas Public Library. A father of five, husband to Emily, and friend to the incarcerated, Dr. Hood rejects institutionalism in favor of a theology rooted in people, presence, and prophetic witness. You can read more about the author here.

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