Eleven police officers were shot, four of them fatally, when two snipers opened fire with rifles in downtown Dallas Thursday evening during a protest over recent police shootings in other states, police said.
One suspect was in a "shootout" with a Dallas SWAT team and was taken into custody, with a "suspicious package" found near where he was captured, Dallas police said. A bomb squad was sent to the scene.
Police said one female was in custody, while another suspect was cornered in a garage and talking to police.
The suspect "told our negotiators that the end is coming, and he's going to hurt and kill more of us," Dallas Police Chief David Brown said.
Police throughout the evening were looking at a variety of "persons of interest."
One man seen wearing camouflage and carrying a rifle, identified as a "person of interest" in a police photo disseminated to the public, quickly turned himself in, police said. A relative said the man was a protester, not one of the gunmen.
Meanwhile, another person was seen carrying a camouflage bag and walking quickly down Lamar Street, then throwing the bag into the back of a black Mercedes and driving off at a high rate of speed, Dallas Police Chief David Brown said.
Officers pulled the vehicle over and were questioning its two occupants.
Brown said authorities have reason to believe that the suspects had threatened to plant a bomb "in the downtown area."
"We believe that these suspects were positioning themselves in a way to triangulate on these officers from two different perches and garages in the downtown area and planned to injure and kill as many law enforcement officers as they could," the chief said.
In a video shot from the perspective of a demonstrator seconds before the shooting, a crowd of protesters walked forward chanting, "Hands up, don't shoot!" a phrase popularized after the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014.
Ten seconds later, the camera suddenly lowers as bodies scatter as the shooting begins. "Go, go, go ... Run, run, run!" a woman shrieks. "Someone's shot! There was a gun ... Someone got shot! Someone got shot!"
An eyewitness video aired on KDFW-TV appears to show a gunman outflanking and shooting a police officer.
The footage shows a man with a rifle standing on the sidewalk, hiding behind a pillar. As another person, apparently a police officer, approaches from behind and hides behind a separate pillar, the gunman turns around and runs toward the officer's pillar, then apparently shoots the officer in the back at close range.
The officer falls to the ground.
At least four of the officers belonged to the Dallas Area Rapid Transit agency, including one of those who died, according to the agency's Twitter account.
"Our thoughts and prayers are with the Dallas law enforcement community and the Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) officers killed and injured this evening," Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said in a statement.
"In times like this, we must remember _ and emphasize _ the importance of uniting as Americans," he said.
The protest began at Belo Garden Park, across from the Bank of America Plaza in the center of downtown Dallas, one of several largely peaceful demonstrations across American cities in response to the shootings this week of two African-American men by white police officers.
"Enough is enough," demonstrators shouted, holding signs that said, "If all lives matter, why are black ones taken so easily?" and "Hate will not win. #BlackLivesMatter."
Larissa Puro, a 26-year-old University of Southern California communications manager who was on vacation in Dallas for a family reunion, was holed up in the kitchen of the nearby Omni hotel kitchen after shots were fired and the police manhunt was underway.
"My mom and I were downtown eating dinner and we took an Uber home, but it had to take a different route because of blocked streets," Puro said. "We couldn't enter our hotel, and ... police told us to run into the hotel kitchen and said there had been a shooting," she said.
"People were crying," she said. "I feel so awful for all the police officers out there."
Videos posted throughout the evening to Twitter and Facebook showed protesters and observers in a frantic commotion as police sirens blazed downtown.
In one video posted to Facebook, Michael Kevin Bautista was standing across the street from four police cars just a block from Belo Garden Park.
"They are shooting now, there's an officer down ... This is Main Street and Lamar," Bautista says into the camera. "There's an officer down, they're moving in somebody. I think they might have gotten somebody."
Later, police rush by him, saying, "Get out of here! Get out of here!"
Wyatt Rosser, a 20-year-old from Dallas who had come to the demonstration, said the shooting did not represent the peaceful demonstrators who had assembled.
"These shooters were radicals. The overall message of today's demonstration was strength, solidarity and peaceful action. It was actually the most peaceful Black Lives Matter demonstration I'd been to," he said.
"Nothing that the speakers, or anyone, spoke about tonight in any way encouraged or supported the actions of these shooters. And it is saddening that all of that is overshadowed by their violent actions," he said.
The Dallas shootings were not the only place where protests led to trouble. In Portland, Ore., where protesters gathered downtown outside the county justice center, police tweeted that they arrested a man who was "displaying a gun during a demonstration."
No shots were fired. Tweets from a reporter for CBS affiliate KOIN News said that "everyone ran screaming." A video of the man purported to have the gun quoted him as saying he pulled it out because he "feared for my life" in the crowd. The reporter said the man was quickly and "aggressively taken down by police."
