Dallas shooting witness: 'It looked like an execution, honestly'

A witness to the shooting in downtown Dallas, Texas, that killed five police officers and injured seven more officers and two civilians told CNN that the attack “looked like an execution, honestly.”

Dallas police chief David Brown said early Thursday morning that the attack appeared to be coordinated between four suspects “working together with rifles triangulated at elevated positions.” There are currently three suspects in custody; another was killed after a standoff with police.

“I thought it was fireworks,” Ismael Dejesus, who was in his hotel room when he heard multiple “popping sounds,” told Don Lemon. Dejesus began filming one of the shooters, who can be seen firing at random.

Later in the video, an officer is shot after approaching the shooter:

He came out to the balcony… man had a rifle, AR-15, clear as day, pretty big magazine… he goes in, drops a few mags. Shooting to the left, goes ahead, turns around, shoots to the right, shoots on the other side of the pillar, honestly he was shooting at something and aiming at somebody. Then, he turned around, checked his back, make sure no one was coming, but the officer did come across the right side of the screen to that pillar to the right and tried to take him one on one in a fire fight. It didn’t end very well. It’s just very tragic.

Another witness told CNN that he saw protesters with the Black Lives Matter march being trampled as they fled from the gunfire.

“People were trampled, then [people] were picking them up,” he said. “It was in the midst of the protest, everything was going on, in the heart of it, it was peaceful… in the midst of it, gun shots just started barreling out.”