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A new police report obtained by the Associated Press reveals no clues as to what motivated last month’s fatal shooting at a Dallas immigration field office. Still, it does paint the accused gunman, 29-year-old Joshua Jahn, as a transient figure, described by his parents as a “loner” who was “obsessed” with artificial intelligence.
According to records written by the Fairview Police Department, Jahn’s family described their son as a “completely normal” young man before moving to Washington several years ago. Family members told authorities that Jahn moved to the Pacific Northwest to answer an online advertisement for a seasonal job harvesting marijuana after going in and out of a local community college for several years.
The farm’s owner told the AP that Jahn “appeared directionless and slept in his car for months.”
Unable to keep a job, Jahn returned to Texas, where his parents noticed changes. While in Washington, Jahn had lived near one of the sites where the atomic bomb was developed during the Manhattan Project. He became convinced that he’d been “exposed to radiation from a nearby facility and was suffering from radiation sickness,” the report states.
Photographs from the crime scene after the Sept. 24 shooting show that Jahn may have had a map of U.S. nuclear fallout sites in his car at the time of the shooting, which injured three immigrants in ICE custody, two fatally. The FBI has stated that the words “Anti-ICE” were found on one of the bullets located at the scene, but Jahn’s mother told Fairview police that politics were a rare topic of conversation for her son.
Jahn also began wearing cotton gloves after returning from Washington, believing that he was “allergic to plastic.” The police report states that Jahn had not been diagnosed with or treated for any mental or physical disorders.
According to authorities, Jahn began practicing target shooting in August of this year in Oklahoma, although it is unclear if the rifle used in his practice is the same as the one that was found at the scene of the attack. Jahn’s mother told the FBI she’d had “no idea” he owned a gun.
Jahn also seemed to enjoy first-person shooter games, logging more than 11,000 hours according to the video game platform Steam. The FBI did not respond to the AP’s request for comment, blaming the ongoing government shutdown for forcing the prioritization of “national security, violations of federal law and essential public safety functions.”
