Parents of 29-year-old gunman Dallas immigration facility Newly released records show the son told police in September that he moved to Washington state and was “perfectly normal” until he returned home several years ago believing he had radiation sickness.
A month before the attack on the roof of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Oklahoma, Joshua Jahn began wearing cotton gloves to avoid contact with plastic and was practicing target shooting with a newly purchased rifle, according to a report written by a Fairview Police Department officer.
Jaan killed two detainees He then injured another person in a shooting on September 24th before taking his own life.
Records obtained by The Associated Press through an open records request offer no clues as to the motive for the attack. Federal authorities previously said Jahn wrote “ANTI-ICE” on the bullet and left a handwritten note indicating he intended to ambush and terrorize ICE agents.
On the day of the shooting, Jahn’s parents told the FBI that Jahn “occasionally discusses current events” with her mother, but they rarely talk, according to new records. His parents said he was “a loner” who was “obsessed” with artificial intelligence technology. Parents Andrew and Sharon Jahn did not immediately respond to text and phone messages from The Associated Press on Monday.
The documents describe Jahn as an unemployed, friendless young man who retired to his bedroom at his parents’ home in suburban Dallas, playing computer games. Jahn has not been diagnosed or treated for any mental or physical illness, his parents said.
Neither police nor the FBI immediately responded to requests for comment. The FBI said only that it is focused on national security, violations of federal law, and critical public safety functions due to the government shutdown.
After returning to Texas, parents noticed changes
Jahn was “totally normal” until he returned from Washington state in the past five years, his parents said. He took classes intermittently at a community college in Texas for years before driving across the country to answer online ads for seasonal jobs harvesting marijuana on legal cannabis farms in Washington. The farm’s owner, Ryan Sanderson, previously told The Associated Press that Jahn was disoriented and had been sleeping in his car for several months.
After Jahn was unable to continue working and returned from Washington, his parents told the FBI that they believed Jahn was “allergic to plastic” and tried to avoid direct skin contact with plastic materials. The county in Washington State where he worked was one of the bases of the secret Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. And they said they believed their son had been “exposed to radiation from nearby facilities and was suffering from radiation sickness” while in Washington.
Photos from the shooting scene show a car covered with a map depicting the US radioactive fallout.
Records show that his home life was far from harmonious. According to police records, Jahn’s father pressured his brother to get a job or join the military after high school, and his mother called police in 2014 when his brother failed to show up to meet with an Army recruiter to sign his enlistment papers.
One morning, Jahn’s mother called the police to report her younger sister, who had been staying over instead of going to high school. As a teenager, he once left home for weeks on end and spray-painted expletives on his parents’ driveway.
But the Yarns supported their youngest son, Joshua, financially as he remained in the upstairs bedroom playing computer games.
Shooting practice in Oklahoma
About a month before Jahn attacked the ICE facility, he and his father went to practice shooting at a site where a new home was being built in Durant, Oklahoma. Jahn’s father owned several guns and was surprised to see his son pull out an “old rifle” from the car. Jahn told her father that she had “recently” purchased a gun online, according to police records.
The mother told the FBI she had “no idea” that her son owned a gun, records said.
The FBI previously announced that Jahn legally obtained the bolt-action rifle used in the shooting. However, police records do not indicate whether that was the gun Jahn used during the target shooting.
Analysts at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which works as part of a program hosted by the Center for Internet Security and focuses on hate and extremism, said they found that Mr. Jahn was playing the game online under the username “Frank Hoeniker.” The username appears to be a misspelling of the ruthless, calculating character in Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 satirical novel about politics, religion, and nuclear proliferation, Cat’s Cradle.
According to game distribution platform Steam, Jahn has logged over 11,000 hours in first-person shooter and survival games.
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Brooke is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
