Bucks man says he was a ‘patriot’ for beheading his father and calling for an armed revolution

Justin Mohn took the witness stand in a Doylestown courtroom Wednesday and unequivocally admitted to a crime he broadcast to the world in a YouTube video last year: He shot his father in the head and beheaded him inside the Levittown home they shared.

“I was making a citizen’s arrest on my father for the crime of treason,” Mohn, 33, said in a calm, even voice at the start of nearly two hours of testimony. “He resisted me, he said he was going to kill me by taking my gun, and I ultimately had to use deadly force.”

On the third day of his trial on charges of murder and related crimes, Mohn made the unusual decision to give the opening statement in his case before taking the witness stand, rather than relying on his defense lawyers, a move that Bucks County Court Judge Stephen Corr told him was uncommon.

But Mohn was resolute, weaving together an esoteric justification for killing his father, Michael, that centered on what he described as a government conspiracy to prevent him from finding stable work and financial independence.

“Although I’m on trial in this courtroom, all of America is on trial today,” Mohn said, warning that, if he is convicted, the country will face dire consequences.

“This case should be a moment of reflection for our country, before we allow the woke, radical leftist ideologies to overtake the status quo, to the detriment of educated, straight, white Christian men.”

Mohn was adamant that he had a normal relationship with his father and never intended to kill him that January day in 2024. He wanted to take him into custody, he said, and corrected First Assistant District Attorney Edward Louka when the prosecutor referred to the killing as a murder.

The plan went awry, Mohn said, when his father — whom he described as an expert martial artist trained in disarming his opponents — tried to grab the Sig Sauer 9mm handgun Mohn was pointing at him.

Afterward, in a video uploaded to YouTube, Justin Mohn displayed his father’s severed head and attempted to assemble a network of militias to help him overthrow the federal government.

His attorney, Steven Jones, later got him to admit on the stand that he had been unable to recruit anyone to join his cause.

Mohn said he beheaded his father for “practical reasons,” not out of hatred or in an attempt to traumatize his mother and siblings.

“I know something such as a severed head could go viral, but it could also lessen the violence if a revolution did occur,” he said, adding that he hoped the violent imagery would inspire people opposed to his revolution to surrender peacefully.

In the video, Mohn encouraged his prospective militia members to follow his example and kill federal employees. His father worked for years as a civil engineer with the Army Corps of Engineers.

Evidence presented Wednesday showed that Mohn had prepared for this call to arms for years. He composed a “battle plan” that outlined how to properly build explosives and chlorine bombs, and researched how Timothy McVeigh carried out his fatal bombings in Oklahoma City in 1995.

Mohn also searched Google for information on whether a handgun bullet could pierce a skull, how to quickly purchase a gun, and whether “you go to heaven if you’ve killed someone.”

He said he believed that his father was cooperating with the federal government’s efforts to “breach the social contract” by making false statements against him to a federal judge. Mohn had filed a federal discrimination lawsuit in Philadelphia, alleging that the government had conspired with his previous employers to fire him in favor of people he described as his less-qualified female and minority coworkers.

The suit was later dismissed.

“Why did the federal government give me a student loan under the guise of getting a degree to get a job to pay that loan back,” Mohn said, “only for them to rule against me, saying I was too overeducated to work to pay off my debt?”

Mohn said his father had told the judge in the civil case that he held extreme right-wing beliefs, likening him to President Donald Trump. That, he believed, inspired the judge to rule against him.

“I believe I’m a patriot, and I love my country,” he said. “If the country had continued down the path it was on under the Biden administration, we would have had to do something to change that course.”

The trial is expected to conclude Thursday.