The McKinney (Texas) Police Department has identified Patrick Gray Sharp, 29, as the man who set a vehicle ablaze and fired some 100 rounds at police headquarters to ambush officers.
He exchanged fire with officers, before shooting himself in the head.
Sharp was certified by the Texas Department of Public Safety to work as a security guard in 2004, after being licensed three years earlier as a jailer by the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement Officer Standards and Education, the Associated Press is reporting.
Sharp's neighbors have expressed surprise that he is the man responsible for the failed ambush attempt. At the same time, they have said lived in Anna, Texas, in a modular home at the end of a modular cul-de-sac with another man and mostly kept to himself.
An hour before attempting to set off a massacre, Sharp wrote to a Georgia teenager on Facebook that "killers like to share their thoughts, seek attention," according to a report in the Dallas Morning News.
He also wrote, "I like to scare people. I enjoy watching people beg for their life. I like watching them drown. When they take their last breath, oh it's amazing."
Sharp, on Monday, parked a white F-150 truck with a trailer in front of the agency's headquarters. The truck was loaded with ammunition and it has been determined that the trailer contained flares, gasoline and ammonium nitrate, according to a video report from the Associated Press.
During the incident, campus safety officials imposed a lockdown at nearby Collin College. Sharp reportedly fired on the cruiser of a campus safety officer who responded to the scene.
