Shots Fired and Cops Killed in Baton Rouge; What Do We Know of the Shooter?
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: Erin, thanks very much. Good evening, everybody. Thanks for joining us. The story, of course, tonight begins out of Baton Rouge. We're in Cleveland, site of tomorrow's Republican convention, but we do begin with the shooting of police officers in Baton Rouge. Shots fired this morning in that city that are echoing here and across the country tonight.</s>COOPER: Those shots this morning took the lives of three law enforcement officers, three law enforcement officers are dead including Baton Rouge Police Officer Montrell Jackson. Family members speaking to the local paper saying that he was a 10-year veteran of the force and a new father. Six days ago he posted an emotional appeal online. I want to read part of it to you. He said in part, "These are trying times. Please don't let hate infect your heart. This city must and will get better. I'm working in these streets, so any protesters, officers, friend, family or whoever, if you see me and need a hug or want to say a prayer, I got you." Officer Jackson was just 32 years old. His son, Mason, is just 4 months old. Two other officers also lost their lives this morning, their names have yet to become public. Obviously, we'll try to find out as much as we can about them when those names are released, we'll let you know about them. Three others were wounded, one critically. Authorities suggest but have not flat out said that only one man was involved and was killed in the shoot-out itself, 29-year-old Gavin Long of Kansas City. Now, we're naming him because investigators have specifically said they want to know more about him and they want to hear from anybody who actually knows him. CNN's Chris Cuomo is in Baton Rouge tonight. He joins with us now with the latest. So, Chris, let's talk about what we now know about this incident. You're hearing about how this shoot-out unfolded.</s>CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR, "NEW DAY": All right, Anderson. So this is a very, still quickly and deeply developing situation. We do have information about what happened this morning. 9:40 local time, that's when this first started which was, this 911 call alerting officers to someone walking down this avenue where we are now, about a mile from our current location with a long gun. So police officers responded. When they did, they were engaged immediately by the gunman. And as we know, the numbers quickly became profoundly deadly. You have three people who lost their lives. You have six others who were hit. Within 10 minutes, you end up having a second reinforcement of officers here and EMT on the scene. And of course, the shooter was taken out by the police here. The larger question that's looming is why, and this man presents a very complex picture that Drew Griffin and the investigative team is working on, as you know. There are multiple identities and certainly a background that is rich with conflict with this shooter. We do know that he was a marine. We know that he went to infantry school. That would explain his, you know, success, to call it that, with the weapon. He knew how to use this long gun. There's also a lot online about him and his expressing in no mixed fashion an animosity towards the police and a belief in fighting back in what he saw as this perverse notion of rebellion. So the police are trying to figure out exactly how this happen, was this call just an observation of the man or was it a setup, a design. Now, on its face, Anderson, it would be enough, if someone saw somebody on the street with a long gun and called it in, it could have precipitated all of this. Online there are videos of this man suggesting his connection to these types of events believing he was called to be in Dallas at the same time as the officer shooting there. He's going to be a complex picture, but it takes you to the same place, Anderson, which is this man came here with an intention to do violence and did just that and the police responded and took him out but not before there were tragic losses.</s>COOPER: You know, early on, Chris, the police had said that there may be other suspects out there, then at that press conference later in the afternoon they said, you know, the active shooter situation is over, it was just the gunman who was killed by police. But at this point are police talking about anybody else he may have actually been in contact with or connected to? Is there any public information about that?</s>CUOMO: It's the right question, Anderson. Our reporting is that they're all over this guy's life right now. They're all around his address in Missouri. They're trying to find out his connections. It's not going to be quick though, Anderson, because they're come up with too much too soon. This man had so many different affiliations, either legitimate or desired with all types of anarchy groups and different surveillance people and different types of extreme and fringe causes. So it's going to be very rich very quickly, Drew Griffin is tracking down a lot of that. That's not an easy task. But some of the explanation of these early calls about multiple shooters does sound familiar in terms of the reporting we did in Dallas. A little bit may have been echo effect. A little bit may be just eyewitness experience of figuring this out. There was a lot of fire very quickly with, on the case of the shooter, a long gun. As you know well, Anderson, the noise that that makes and the reverberation of it can to be enough to distract and make people wonder where gunfire is coming from and from how many.</s>COOPER: We're also learning and we talked a little bit at the top of the broadcast, a little bit about one of the police officers killed.</s>CUOMO: Say it again, Anderson, please. I'm sorry.</s>COOPER: We're just starting to learn a little bit more about the officers themselves who were killed.</s>CUOMO: You know, we know that there are three at this time. We also know that there are people who are critically injured. You never want to get ahead of yourself on the numbers, you know, as you know very well. We still don't know what's going to happen here. These are real injuries and there real battles going on in the local hospital. But one of the officers that's come out, 32-year-old, just had a son of his own. And there's a special poignant with this officer because he posted last week about Alton Sterling's death and how he felt such tension from it and such pain in his heart as an African-American and as a police officer. Montrell Jackson was his name, 32 years old. And this post, people are really seeing it as a source of someone who really put his finger on this situation. He talked about the pain of being an officer and being second guessed in the community that he puts his life on the line to protect and also the confusion of being an African-American male who gets one type of heat in uniform and another type of heat out of uniform. And he expressed it very beautifully. And at the end, he resolved to keep protecting this community, if people needed a hug, he would give it to them. He said, "I'm on it. I've got your back. And he was telling people not to let hate infect their own hearts and then, here he is, the victim of hate himself.</s>COOPER: Yeah, one of three killed in line of duty today. Chris Cuomo, thank you very much. As you mentioned, local and state authorities really have been all over this case working to put together a picture of the man authorities have identified as the killer. As Chris said, they're searching for who he may have associated with, where he traveled, what he did online, anything really to get a better sense of what may have motivated him to do this. Tonight, we're learning that this search is beginning to bear some information. CNN Senior Investigative Correspondent Drew Griffin as Chris mentioned joins us with that. So at this point, what more do we know about this shooter?</s>DREW GRIFFIN, CNN SENIOR INVESTIGATIVE CORRESPONDENT: First of all, Anderson, I think we should explain to your regular viewers that we are going to use his name and there's a reason for that. His name is Gavin Eugene Long, 29, he served five years in the marines, left honorably in 2010. The reason we are using his name tonight is because police are looking for more information on this person in any kind of information that could be culled from across the country to those people who knew him. He was known online on two different websites as a man he called Cosmo Setepenra. He called himself a freedom strategist, an author and spiritual advisor. As we've been reporting, he's followed many, may conspiracy groups dedicated to anti-government surveillance, anti-law enforcement monitoring, and he posted on a group called stop organized gang stalking. On the videos that CNN has been viewing, which we do believe is him, he has talked openly of revolution. He has talked about fighting back against the bullies and in an ominous post that he claims to have filmed from Dallas after the shooting of those Dallas police officers he wrote, "You've got to fight back. That's the only way a bully knows to quit." That's the picture that's being painted at least across his own social media of a person who obviously had some kind of beef with the police who came to Baton Rouge this morning and from what we can determine seems to have come here for one reason and that was to hunt police. Anderson?</s>COOPER: Just so sickening. Drew Griffin, we'll continue to follow those leads. I want to go to Fred Jackson, he's Montrell Jackson's uncle. He joins us now by phone. Fred, I'm so sorry for your loss, for your family's loss. Please tell us about your nephew. What kind of guy was he?</s>FRED JACKSON, MONTRELL JACKSON'S UNCLE: Anderson, you know, I've been in Michigan for the last 23 years coaching college football. But I will go home two or three times a year. And every time you would go, you get an opportunity to see this young man. He's my youngest brother's son. And he was going to be 33 years old, going to be 34 this December, and just a tremendous dedicated individual. Really believed in what he was doing, believed in helping people. That was his whole thing. He want to help other people.</s>COOPER: And he got a young baby.</s>JACKSON: Yes. Haven't been that long. I think three or four months old. You know, every time I had an opportunity to talk to him, he was all about what he could do to help other people. He just wanted to do things. He just thought he could do something to help Baton Rouge be a better city in which he live, a tremendous young fellow.</s>COOPER: He'd written online in the wake of the Alton Sterling shooting about some of the pressures he was facing, the difficulties he was facing, the difficulties he was facing but being a police officer, is that something he always wanted to do?</s>JACKSON: Yes. That's what Jose, my brother's name's Jose, was telling me he always wanted to be somewhere that he can be protective and be dedicated, I guess, on people. And, you know, he is just with a self-motivated person who thought he could do something to help, you know, just other people be better. And that's -- he's been like that all his life, just a dedicated young man. That's just the way he was.</s>COOPER: I can't imagine how his family is holding up now. I mean, where do you go from here?</s>JACKSON: It's very, very tough. I just talked to my sister and my brother who still live there. And my brother, who is his father, was just saying, you know, all of the time when he was around, it was all based on the fact that he could do something to change, he could do something to make a change and that's probably why he wrote the letter that he wrote. And it's so hard on them right now because it' so unexpected, yet still, when you are a father of a policeman, you have a tendency to understand a little bit about the type of job that it is and, you know, these things can happen. But you don't realize how bad it is until it hits home. It's very difficult right now for his entire family.</s>COOPER: Yeah. Well, again, please pass along our condolences and our thought, our prayers, Fred Jackson, thank you very much for joining us.</s>JACKSON: Thank you.</s>COOPER: There's more late developments from Baton Rouge throughout the next two hours of this broadcast. Just ahead, Donald trump and his new running Mike Pence, what they said especially what Donald Trump said is making new headlines and raising some eyebrows as well tonight. We'll talk about that ahead and more of the details coming out of Baton Rouge.