Trial begins for Bucks County man who decapitated his father and shared it on YouTube while attempting to start a revolution

Justin Mohn believed his country was being destroyed from within, prosecutors in Bucks County said Monday. And from his home in Levittown he planned to start a revolution in January 2024, posting a YouTube video calling to arms a “network of underground militias” that he said he controlled.

The catalyst for that supposed revolution, prosecutors said, was Mohn killing and decapitating his father, Michael, a semiretired federal worker who had been labeled a traitor by his youngest son.

In that 15-minute video, played in its entirety in a Doylestown courtroom at the start of Mohn’s bench trial on a charge of first-degree murder, Mohn displays his father’s bloodied, severed head and declares himself the “acting president of America”, as well as a messianic figure revered by his followers.

But Assistant District Attorney Ashley Towhey said none of that was real — Mohn was a 33-year-old man living at home with and supported by his parents. He struggled to hold a job, his grieving mother, Denice, testified, and had suffered an “emotional breakdown” while living and working in Colorado years earlier.

Above all, the prosecutor said, Mohn was a murderer who shot his father in the head, ambushing him while he was defenseless inside a bathroom.

“This is not a case of whodunit, why it was done, or how it was done,” Towhey said. “This case is about how Justin Mohn assassinated his father, and callously used him as a prop to force the government to meet his demands.”

Beyond admitting to the murder, Towhey said, Mohn was proud of it and had spent months researching and detailing a “cold and calculated plan to force the government to bend to his will.”

Mohn, dressed in a brown sport coat, held a bemused smirk as his video was played in court.

The message had quickly gone viral, and brought national attention to the modest home on Upper Orchard Drive where Mohn and his parents had lived.

Previously, Mohn told The Inquirer and other news outlets he killed his father while making a “citizen’s arrest” and used deadly force to protect himself.

In the video, Mohn makes multiple demands, calling for then-President Joe Biden to step down, the abolition of “woke and gender ideology and propaganda,” and the dissolution of the Federal Reserve.

“If there is a nonmilitary federal employee in your family or friend group, make it your New Year’s resolution to kill them,” Mohn said.

Mohn also promised $1 million “bounties” on prominent federal officials, including then-U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland and former U.S. Attorney General William Barr, and instructed his followers to kill a federal judge who had ruled against him in a civil lawsuit. He even provided the judge’s address.

The day before Mohn recorded the video and killed his father, he bought a Sig Sauer handgun from a gun store in Croydon, according to evidence presented Monday.

That was the final step in his planning stage, prosecutors said, after weeks of buying outdoor survival equipment and conducting exhaustive online searches about federal building blueprints, bomb-making instructions, and even the decibel levels a gunshot makes.

After killing his father, a civil engineer for the Army Corps of Engineers, Mohn stole his Toyota Corolla and drove hours west to Fort Indiantown Gap, a National Guard base near Harrisburg, investigators said Monday. There, he was arrested for trespassing and demanded to speak with leadership at the base in an attempt to recruit the guardsmen for his budding revolution.

He was still carrying the homicide weapon.

Mohn’s mother, Denice, in tearful testimony, said she could not understand why her son had killed his father. She testified that he had struggled after college to find a job, and “blamed the education system and the government for him not doing well.”

“We did not see this coming,” she said. “We were hoping for a brighter future for him, and happiness.”

Mohn’s trial is expected to last through Wednesday before Bucks County Court Judge Stephen Corr.