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A Pennsylvania man has been arrested and charged with murder after he allegedly killed his father and displayed his decapitated head in a now-removed YouTube video.
Justin Mohn, 32, was taken into custody Wednesday morning and charged with killing his father, 68-year-old Michael Mohn.
According to several U.S. news outlets, Mohn uploaded a politically charged video to YouTube Tuesday, showing what he claimed was his dad’s decapitated head, while ranting about his grievances with the Biden administration and declaring himself the new acting president of the United States under martial law.
The video, reports CNN, circulated for several hours on YouTube and racked up more than 5,000 views before it was removed.
He has now been charged with murder and abuse of a corpse, among other charges, according to police.
Officers responded to a call in Levittown, in central Pennsylvania, on Tuesday night after reports of a decapitated body from the victim’s wife, who arrived home to find her husband beheaded and covered in blood.
Responding officers found Michael Mohn’s body in the first floor bathroom and his head inside a plastic bag in a kitchen pot placed in a first-floor bedroom, according to a police affidavit.
Mohn allegedly fled in his father’s car. Police were able to track him down through cellphone data.
Middletown Township Police Chief Joseph Bartorilla told CNN that civilian police and Pennsylvania State police found Mohn at a National Guard training base near Harrisburg, approximately 160 kilometres from where his father was found dead. Police said it is unclear why Mohn was in that area.
Pete Feeney, police captain for Middletown Township, told reporters that Mohn later uploaded a 14-minute long video, titled Mohn’s Militia – Call to Arms for American Patriots, in which he allegedly showed a decapitated head in a cooking pot to the camera and identified it by his father’s name.
Feeny also said it appeared the alleged killer was reading from a script as he called his dad a traitor for working for the federal government for 20 years, referred to himself as a militia leader, railed against the Black Lives Matter movement and LGBTQ+ community and threatened several federal agencies.
“America is rotting from the inside out as far left, woke mobs rampage our once prosperous cities,” CNN, who viewed the video, reports Mohn as saying.
“I am now officially the acting president of America under martial law,” he continued, reports local outlet LevittownNow.com, before calling for a “second American Revolution.”
“There’s plenty of evidence to process, I’m sure they’ll be reviewing that video,” Feeney told ABC News.
According to The Independent, many of his “alleged talking points in the video echoed violent conspiracy theories, such as the QAnon movement, which has been peddled by far-right commentators.”
CNN Law Enforcement Analyst and former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe called Mohn’s views in the video “extremely concerning.”
“The bigger picture here is that this is another example of the fact that the kind of overheated, deeply politicized, extreme rhetoric that you hear sometimes in this country from politically elected officials and leaders actually has an impact on these marginalized people with extremist views who might be … driven to embark on acts of violence,” he said.
“Some of the things that he has said on the video — allegedly referring to woke mobs and things like that – that’s not dissimilar from rhetoric that you hear from some politicians that we’ve heard recently in the primary season,” McCabe continued.
Court records obtained by LevittownNow.com show that while Mohn had no previous criminal charges before this week, he did sue the U.S. government for allowing him to take out student loan debt that he had to repay, and asked for $10 million in damages. His complaint was dismissed in federal court four times.
He also sued his former employer, Progressive Insurance, in 2019, claiming that the company held him back from advancement because he was a man.
Police say the investigation is active and ongoing. A judge ordered Mohn to be held without bail, court records show. His next hearing is set for Feb. 8.