A Pennsylvania man has been arrested after allegedly filming a gruesome YouTube video in which he displayed his father’s dismembered head while spouting right-wing conspiracy theories.
Justin Mohn, 32, of Middletown Township, in Bucks County, is accused of killing his father, 68-year-old Michael Mohn, at the family’s home.
Justin’s mother, Denice Mohn, found her husband’s dead body and called police around 7 p.m. last Tuesday.
When police arrived, they found the decapitated body of Michael Mohn in a downstairs bathroom, with “a large amount of blood around him,” and a machete and a large kitchen knife in the bathtub, according to a police report.
In a bedroom next to the bathroom, police also found the elder Mohn’s head inside a plastic bag, which was stuffed inside a cooking pot. They also found bloody, clear rubber gloves in another bedroom. The gloves appear to match a pair of gloves that Mohn is seen wearing in the YouTube video.
Denice Mohn told police that she’d last been home at 2 p.m., and that her son was the only person at the residence. When she returned home, she discovered her son was missing, as was a white Toyota Corolla registered to her husband that had been parked in the driveway, reports NBC News.
Sometime after allegedly beheading his father, Mohn reportedly filmed and posted a 14-minute-long video to YouTube — which has since been removed — called “Mohn’s Militia – Call to Arms for American Patriots.”
In the video, he referred to his father, an employee of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, as a “traitor” for having worked for the federal government for 20 years and “is now in hell for eternity.”
Mohn allegedly called for the deaths of all federal employees and attacked President Joe Biden’s administration, the Black Lives Matter movement, the LGBTQ community, and “far-left woke mobs,” parroting various right-wing and anti-transgender conspiracy theories.
In a clip from the video posted to X by Alejandra Caraballo, a civil rights attorney and clinical instructor at the Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic, Mohn reportedly called for “the ceasing of all woke and gender ideology propaganda in schools and other public places,” and “the capturing and torturing of federal employees and their associates.”
The post has since been removed.
According to Philadelphia NBC affiliate WCAU, investigators believe Mohn may have been reading from a prepared script in the video.
According to the police complaint, Mohn can be seen in the video wearing rubber gloves and holding his father’s severed head in a plastic bag. The head can be seen in a cooking pot later in the video.
A YouTube spokesperson told NBC News in a statement that the video was removed from the platform because of YouTube’s “strict policies prohibiting graphic violence and violent extremism.”
“The video was removed for violating our graphic violence policy and Justin Mohn’s channel was terminated in line with our violent extremism policies,” the spokesperson said. “Our teams are closely tracking to remove any re-uploads of the video.”
Hours later, police arrested Mohn more than 100 miles from his family’s home, near Fort Indiantown Gap, where a National Guard training facility is located.
Watson told NBC News that Mohn had jumped over a fence and entered the base. A short while later, officers took Mohn, who was “armed with a firearm,” into custody “without incident.” No one was injured during the time Mohn was on base.
Mohn was charged with first-degree murder, abuse of a corpse, and possessing an instrument of crime with intent, according to court documents. He was arraigned on the charges and was denied bail.
Middletown Township Detective Lt. Stephen Forman said that police had had previous contact or interactions with Mohn — some in recent months, some going as far back as a decade ago.
Neighbors of the Mohn family described Justin Mohn as “weird” and “unhinged,” with one neighbor telling WCAU that he had called police several times in recent months to report Mohn for starting directly at his house from across the street.
Mohn previously filed three lawsuits against the federal government, including one in which he claimed the government had “negligently and fraudulently induced him to borrow money to pay for his education without sufficiently warning him of the possibility that he would face a difficult job market and could be unable to pay back his loan.”
Two of the lawsuits were dismissed, while a judge denied the third, citing a failure to pay a $2,000 filing fee.
In 2020, Mohn sued his former employer, Progressive Insurance, claiming that he had been discriminated against on the basis of sex for being a man. But according to WCAU, court records show he was terminated after kicking in the door of his workplace in August 2017. A court ruled that Mohn had failed to prove he had suffered discrimination at work.
As reported by NBC News, Mohn self-published a nonfiction book, The Revolution Leader’s Survival Guide, via Amazon in 2017. The book contains the transcript of a letter to then-President Donald Trump warning of “a peaceful revolution helped led by the author if positive change does not come to America and the world soon.”
In another self-published pamphlet, Mohn wrote that “Americans will have to weigh what is worse — allowing themselves to lose freedom and independence, or killing their own family members, teachers, coworkers, bosses, judges, elected leaders, and other older generations who are traitors and wish to take away the freedom and independence that comes with America, democracy, and free market capitalism,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.
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