Records Reveal Dallas ICE Facility Shooter's Radiation Exposure Fears and Shooting Practice

Share and Follow

Newly disclosed documents reveal insights into the background of the 29-year-old shooter who unleashed gunfire at a Dallas immigration center last month. According to police records, the shooter’s parents described him as “completely normal” until a move to Washington state, after which he returned home claiming to suffer from radiation sickness.

The gunman, identified as Joshua Jahn, had taken up wearing cotton gloves to avoid touching plastic and had recently engaged in target practice with a new rifle in Oklahoma. This practice occurred just a month before his deadly assault on the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, where he launched his attack from a rooftop, as detailed in a report by an officer from the Fairview Police Department.

In the tragic events of September 24, Jahn fatally shot two detainees and injured another before ending his own life.

Despite the breadth of information in the records, obtained by The Associated Press under an open records request, the motive behind Jahn’s actions remains unclear. Federal investigators had previously noted that Jahn inscribed “ANTI-ICE” on a bullet and left behind handwritten notes expressing his intention to ambush and instill fear in ICE agents.

Related Article: Mark Sanchez’s career at a crossroads following stabbing incident, say PR experts.

The documents portray Jahn as an unemployed, friendless young man who had withdrawn into playing computer games in his bedroom at his parents’ home in a Dallas suburb. Jahn was not diagnosed with or treated for any mental or physical disorders, his parents said.

Neither the police nor FBI immediately responded to a request for comment. The FBI said only that because of the government shutdown it was focused on national security, violations of federal law, and essential public safety functions.

Parents noticed changes after a move back to Texas

Jahn had been “completely normal” until he moved back from Washington state in the past five years, his parents said. He had previously taken classes at a Texas community college on and off for years, before driving across the country to answer an online advertisement for a seasonal job harvesting marijuana at a legal cannabis farm in Washington. Jahn appeared directionless and slept in his car for months, the farm’s owner Ryan Sanderson previously told the AP.

After returning from Washington because he could not retain a job, Jahn’s parents told the FBI he believed he was “allergic to plastic” and sought to avoid direct skin contact with the material. The county where he worked in Washington state was one of the sites for the secret Manhattan Project to develop atomic bombs. And they said their son became convinced that while in Washington, he had been “exposed to radiation from a nearby facility and was suffering from radiation sickness.”

Photographs from the scene of the shooting show a car affixed with a map depicting radioactive fallout in the U.S.

Records suggest his family life was far from harmonious. Jahn’s father had put pressure on his older brother to find a job or join the military after high school, and his mother called the police when the brother failed to show up to a meeting with an Army recruiter to sign enlistment papers in 2014, police records show.

Jahn’s mother called police on his sister one morning when she slept in rather than go to high school, moving out of the home for weeks as a teenager and once spray painting an expletive on the driveway of the family’s home.

But the Jahns financially supported Joshua, their youngest son, as he stayed in his second-floor bedroom and played computer games.

Practice shooting in Oklahoma

About a month before Jahn attacked the ICE facility, he went with his father to practice shooting at their property in Durant, Oklahoma, where they are building a new home. While Jahn’s father owned several guns, he was surprised to see his son pull an “old rifle” out of his car. Jahn told his father he had “recently” purchased the gun online, police records show.

According to the records, his mother told the FBI she had “no idea” her son owned a gun.

The FBI said previously that Jahn legally obtained the bolt-action rifle used in the shooting. But police records don’t say whether that was the gun Jahn used while target shooting.

Analysts with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which focuses on hate and extremism, working as part of a program organized by the Center for Internet Security, said it found that Jahn played games online under the username “Frank Hoenniker.” The username is apparently a misspelled reference to a cold and calculating character in author Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 satirical novel, “Cat’s Cradle,” about politics, religion and nuclear proliferation.

Steam, a game distribution platform, shows Jahn logged more than 11,000 hours on first-person shooter and survival games.

Brook 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.