A Bucks County man is facing murder charges after allegedly decapitating his father, then posting about it on YouTube

In 2020, Justin Mohn published his call to action online, arguing for a “hypothetical, violent revolution” against “traitor older generations” for the debt and unemployment burdening those who came after them.

On Tuesday night, there was nothing hypothetical about the grisly crime that police accused the 32-year-old man of carrying out in his parents’ Bucks County home.

Authorities say Mohn decapitated his father in the bathroom of their Levittown home, posted a YouTube video in which he spouted right-wing conspiracy theories and displayed his father’s severed head, then fled 100 miles to the state’s National Guard headquarters.

He was charged Wednesday in Bucks County with first-degree murder, abuse of a corpse, and possessing an instrument of a crime, and is being held without bail.

Called at about 7 p.m. Tuesday by Mohn’s mother, Middletown Township police responded to the home in the quiet suburb on Upper Orchard Drive, where they found the body of the suspect’s father, Michael F. Mohn, 68. He was a retired civil engineer for the Army Corps of Engineers, law enforcement sources said. According to the criminal complaint, “a large amount of blood” surrounded the body. Left in the bathtub were a machete and large kitchen knife.

Officers then found the man’s head wrapped in a plastic bag inside a cooking pot in a nearby bedroom, the criminal complaint said. Elsewhere in the house, police found bloodied rubber gloves on a desk and in a trash can.

The father and son were the only ones in the house Tuesday evening, Michael Mohn’s wife told police. When she returned home to discover the scene, according to the criminal complaint, the front door was unlocked, her son was gone, and her husband’s 2009 Toyota Corolla was missing.

In the hours before police were called, Justin Mohn posted a graphic video to YouTube, Middletown Township police said, in which he displayed his father’s severed head, ranted about the federal government, and urged the U.S. Postal Service to cease operations. In the video, the son wore rubber gloves, and picked the head out of the cooking pot found at the home, police said in the criminal complaint.

In the video, which YouTube has since removed, the son called his father a “traitor” and said he’s happy that he is dead. ”He is now in hell for eternity,” he said, according to the complaint. Justin Mohn also said in the video that his father was a longtime federal employee, and ranted against the federal government and what he called “far-left woke mobs.”

Pinging his cell phone at about 9 p.m., investigators tracked Justin Mohn about 100 miles away from his home, near Fort Indiantown Gap, where Pennsylvania’s National Guard is stationed. Police officers there then found the 2009 Corolla parked outside the National Guard installation, said Angela Watson, communications director of the Pennsylvania Department of Military and Veterans Affairs. Officers, she said, determined that Mohn, who was armed, had climbed the fence into the National Guard installation, and arrested him without incident as he was walking down the street.

The contents of his 14-minute YouTube video mirrored sentiments from a sweeping manifesto that Justin Mohn penned in 2020 — titled “America’s Coming Bloody Revolution” — in which he called for a “revolution” against anyone born before 1991, blaming previous generations for “trading away the future of America’s youth.”

He posted the now-deleted pamphlet to Booksie, a free, online publishing site, writing: “To be blunt, 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.” He likened his writings to Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense,” which advocated for the 13 American colonies to separate from Britain.

In 2022, Mohn sued the U.S. Department of Education for $10 million, asserting that he was not properly warned that he would not be able to repay his college loans. He represented himself in court. The 2014 Pennsylvania State University graduate in agribusiness management attributed his struggles in finding a job and having to move back in with his parents to being perceived by employers as an “overeducated, white male.”

A federal appeals court dismissed his claim in June.

Court records show he held a variety of short-term jobs between 2014 and 2020, working in Colorado Springs in insurance and credit union call centers and Jersey Mike’s Subs, and for one month in 2020 as a client service representative at a security company in Bristol.

Over those years, he applied for hundreds of other positions, according to an accounting he included in his lawsuit against the Department of Education. In 2018, he also unsuccessfully sued Progressive Insurance in Colorado Springs, where he asserted that he was discriminated against in his job as a call center service representative because he was an “overeducated, overqualified young male.”

Along with his manifesto, Mohn left a trail of digital fingerprints through synth music albums he uploaded on iTunes, posts on video gaming forums associated with an email address on his student loan documents, and social media posts mentioning his self-styled militia.

A now-deleted Reddit profile and posts show Mohn’s activity on “MilitiaArmoryOnlyFans” — a group mostly dedicated to discussing firearms and related products in July 2023 under the subject line “Join America’s National Militia — Mohn’s Militia.” The post attracted only a few skeptical responses.

Screenshots posted on another internet forum depict more about “Mohn’s Militia” from an account called “ThePoet.” The user describes a House resolution aimed at impeaching FBI Director Christopher Wray, introduced last year by U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.). The same user indicates that copies of the legislation had been sent to “Senator John Fetterman, Representative Tina Davis, [State] Senator Robert Tomlinson, Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, and Senator Bob Casey” — all legislators who have represented Mohn’s hometown.

Upper Orchard Drive was quiet Wednesday morning, and Mohn’s home appeared undisturbed, with no visible signs of the previous night’s events. A white Subaru was parked in the driveway.

Neighbors were reluctant to speak to reporters, citing safety concerns and the nature of the crime. But several said the Mohn family kept mostly to themselves.

One neighbor, who asked to remain anonymous for those reasons, said that he never observed anything that led him to believe the younger Mohn would do something violent, but that there was something “off” about him. The neighbor said Mohn rarely spoke to anyone, despite having moved into the home at least two years ago.

The neighbor recalled seeing the man occasionally sitting pensively on a curb or strolling through the neighborhood.

“He’d walk around in the middle of the day, middle of the night,” said the neighbor. “Not creepy, but weird, at 11 p.m. and 2 a.m.”

Joan DeHaven said she and her husband knew Justin Mohn to sit on a raised manhole in the middle of a clearing, staring directly at their home.

He struck her as jittery, she said, often taking off when she and her husband would approach.

DeHaven said Mohn’s behavior concerned her enough to call police, though that didn’t change anything.

DeHaven said she saw Mohn sitting on the manhole across from their home as recently as Saturday, smoking.

Staff writer Robert Moran contributed to this article.