A 21-Year-Old Australian Describes Being in the Middle of the Dallas Sniper Shooting

When I called Manal Younus to find out what had happened she was still processing. She had posted to Facebook message about how she was in the crowd at the Black Lives Matter protest as a sniper opened fire killing five police officers and wounding seven more in downtown Dallas. Manal is a poet, an impressive human being, and a friend of mine from Adelaide.

She had only been in Dallas for two weeks, visiting family, and had turned up to the protest to support a movement she believed in. She arrived a little before the 7 PM start time. There was a real energy about being there—the conversations happening among everyone that was marching and chanting, there must have been 1000 people. Everything had been going to plan, Manal explained. And then there were gunshots.

Here's what happened, in her own words:

I didn't hear the gunshots. There were police cars and sirens and helicopters already going. All I could hear was helicopters and chanting. In retrospect, I think maybe I did hear gunshots because the propellers sounded more intense then, so maybe I did hear gunshots, but I don't know. I can't confirm that. It was just helicopters ripping the wind apart.

I wasn't at the front. I was at least 50 metres away from the front when the running started. But a bunch of people turned around in front of me and started running back.

People looked so genuinely scared. I've never seen that before. Coming from Australia, where guns are not even a threat, nothing would create that fear because there is nothing around us that can take our lives that easily.

I actually thought, because I've seen protest videos and stuff, that maybe it was tear gas or something. And I thought, Oh shit. I want to be able to see. I want to be able to get home. And that's what I was running from. Then someone said there's been gunshots and I was like, Okay this is life or death. I need to do something, I need to hide.

It's so scary because it's so uncertain, especially for someone who is not used to this at all. But everyone knew they had to run because they knew what the other possibility was. It was scary to see everyone's faces. And you just had no idea. Nobody had no idea where the gunshots were coming from. No one knew if it were some crazy white supremacist who had infiltrated the protest or actually one of the police officers.

I went to a carpark because there were all these police cars coming around and we didn't know who had been shooting. Being black myself, I obviously did not want to get caught by anybody doing anything. So I ducked into a carpark but more people had ducked in there to hide because it was covered by bushes. Then we heard more police cars and we were like we got to get out of here… I was going to the train station, but I would have had to walk straight through [the police] again, so I tried to walk to another station. I found I was walking as far away from the scene as I could. Away from the cars. Away from everything.

And everyone was checking on you, by the way. So many people were running away, people were running into random buildings. It was chaotic, everyone running in every directions. But people were stopping and asking, are you alright? Do you know where you are going? I had no idea where I was going, I was just going to the train station. I'd been in Dallas for two weeks, but I had only been downtown once.

So yeah, I didn't know, and I was just avoiding wherever the police were congregating. Obviously they were going to where the crowd was, where the shooting was, so I was like, stay away from that. Somebody said to me—because I started walking back in that direction again—I wouldn't go that way if I was you. I said, "I'm going with you," and I just walked the other way and kept on walking.

Then when I found the train station, the trains were shut down so I was waiting for a while, the whole city was on lockdown. I was hearing from some people that there were police officers killed, and there were two dead at that time. Then I was talking to a man at the train station and he explained there was a man shooting from a building and there were three dead.

Nobody should have died. Nobody should have been shot. Everything until then was just so on point. The way black people were voicing the truth. Black people weren't afraid to talk about white supremacy in that space, even among those white people there because they were allies and it was a really good space. But I think that was all destroyed. Not necessarily the whole movement was destroyed, but that Thursday night in Dallas, that was destroyed and it was a peaceful movement.

We were pushing boundaries, getting attention, raising awareness, but it ended like this. The memory will not be that people rallied across the country to declare that black lives matter and show support for all of the people who have been killed unjustly by police officers. Instead it will be about these police officers who got shot. It's unfortunate. Not just because people got killed, but because the conversation will now be redirected. We can't let that happen.

This has been edited for length and clarity.

Interview by Royce Kurmelovs. Follow him on Twitter.