Parents of the 29-year-old gunman who shot Immigration facility in Dallas In September, she told police that their son was “perfectly normal” before he moved to Washington state and returned home several years ago thinking he had radiation sickness, according to newly released records.
Joshua Gunn began wearing cotton gloves to avoid contact with plastic and practiced shooting with a newly purchased rifle in Oklahoma a month before the deadly rooftop attack on a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building, according to a report written by a Fairview Police Department officer.
Jan Two detainees were killed Another was wounded before he committed suicide in the shooting on September 24.
The records, obtained by The Associated Press through an open records request, do not reveal any clues about the motive for the attack. Federal authorities previously said Jean wrote “ANTI-ICE” on a bullet and left handwritten notes indicating he wanted to ambush and terrorize ICE agents.
The new records show that on the day of the shooting, Jean’s parents told the FBI that he “occasionally discussed current events” with his mother but rarely participated in the conversations. His parents said he was a “loner” and “obsessed” with artificial intelligence technology. The parents, Andrew and Sharon Gunn, did not immediately respond Monday to text and phone messages from the AP.
The documents portray Jan as an unemployed, friendless young man who retreated to playing computer games in his bedroom at his parents’ home in suburban Dallas. Jan has not been diagnosed or treated for any mental or physical disorders, his parents said.
Neither police nor the 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.
Jan was “completely normal” until he returned from Washington state in the past five years, his parents said. He had previously taken classes at a Texas community college off and on for years, before driving across the country to answer an online ad for a seasonal job harvesting marijuana at a legal hemp farm in Washington. Jan seemed directionless and slept in his car for several months, the farm’s owner, Ryan Sanderson, previously told the AP.
After returning from Washington because he could not hold down a job, Jan’s parents told the FBI that 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 of the secret Manhattan Project to develop atomic bombs. 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.”
Pictures from the scene of the shooting show a car attached to a map depicting radioactive fallout in the United States
Records indicate that his family life was far from harmonious. Jan’s father had pressured his older brother to find a job or join the Army after high school, and his mother called police when the brother failed to show up at a meeting with an Army recruiter to sign enlistment papers in 2014, police records show.
Jan’s mother called the police one morning when she was sleeping in instead of going to high school, and she was out of the house for weeks as a teenager and once sprayed obscene paint on the driveway of the family home.
But the Jean family supported Joshua, their youngest son, financially, staying in his second-floor bedroom and playing computer games.
About a month before Jean attacked the ICE facility, he went with his father to practice shooting on their property in Durant, Oklahoma, where they were building a new home. While Jan’s father owned several rifles, he was surprised to see his son pulling an “old rifle” out of his car. Jan told his father that he “recently” bought the gun online, police records show.
According to records, his mother told the FBI she had “no idea” her son owned a gun.
The FBI previously said Jean legally obtained the gun used in the shooting. But police records do not indicate whether this was the weapon Jan used while shooting the target.
Analysts at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which focuses on hate and extremism and operates within a program organized by the Center for Internet Security, said they found that Jan played online games under the username “Frank Hoenecker.” The username appears to be a misspelled reference to a cold, sensitive character in author Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 satirical novel, “Cat’s Cradle,” about politics, religion and nuclear proliferation.
Steam, a game distribution platform, shows that Jahn has logged more than 11,000 hours in first-person shooters and survival games.
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Brock is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America It is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.