Levittown man who beheaded his father said he did so in a ‘citizen’s arrest’ gone wrong

Justin Mohn plotted the murder of his father, Michael, for more than a month, Bucks County prosecutors said Tuesday.

He ordered survival gear and other supplies from Amazon, wrote out a to-do list outlining plans to shoot and behead his father, and jotted down specific directions so he could avoid detection on toll roads on his way to Fort Indiantown Gap, where he fled after the killing, prosecutors said.

First Assistant District Attorney Edward Louka said Mohn, 32, planned the crime with precision, attacking his father in the Levittown home they shared. He shot him in the head with a 9mm Sig Sauer handgun he had had purchased a day earlier, then used a kitchen knife and a machete to sever his father’s head, which he later displayed in a viral YouTube video in which he spouted antigovernment rhetoric.

Michael Mohn, 68, a retired civil engineer for the Army Corps of Engineers, was targeted in part because of his work for the federal government, Louka said.

“Mr. Mohn, based on his beliefs, was making a call to arms to achieve the aims he believes in,” Louka said after the hearing. “He did that through violence. The violence was the murder of his father, who, it’s no coincidence, was a federal employee.”

Mohn, for his part, told reporters in impromptu comments Tuesday outside the Bucks County Justice Center that he killed his father while attempting to make a citizen’s arrest. He said his father had to die because of his connections to the government.

“I and a lot of other people around America believe the federal government has betrayed America, they’re destroying the country, and we have to do something to take the country back,” Mohn said.

“[My father] was a federal employee and betrayed me,” he added. “I was trying to perform a citizen’s arrest and he resisted that citizen’s arrest. It’s lawful to use deadly force in that event.”

At the hearing, Magisterial District Judge Charles Jonas held Mohn for trial on charges including first-degree murder, abuse of corpse, and robbery. Jonas dismissed one of three counts of terrorism, citing a lack of evidence.

Mohn’s attorney, Steven Jones, discounted the “call to arms” Mohn made in the Jan. 30 video in which he professed to command a national network of militias and encouraged their members to kill federal employees and take over federal buildings.

“He was espousing this online in a weird diatribe that didn’t speak to anyone,” Jones said. “Clearly it didn’t, because no one rose up to follow him.”

After the shooting, Mohn tried to cut his father’s head off with a kitchen knife, but resorted to a machete with an 18-inch blade when the knife proved ineffective, according to testimony.

Mohn wrapped the severed head in plastic and filmed a video in his bedroom in which he called his father a traitor and railed against the federal government.

A blood trail later led investigators to the elder Mohn’s dismembered corpse, still in the home’s bathroom. His head was in a basement bedroom, inside a stock pot.

After the killing, Mohn stole his father’s car and drove to Fort Indiantown Gap, where he was arrested for trespassing on the National Guard base there. He told police he wanted to speak with the general in command at the base, in an attempt to recruit him to his quest to overthrow the federal government, according to testimony Tuesday.

Mohn later repeated that plan in prison letters to various elected officials, including Gov. Josh Shapiro, and podcast host Joe Rogan.

Mohn will be arraigned in county court in October.