A vehicle is parked in the driveway of a home that was a scene of a murder in Levittown, Pa., on Wednesday, Jan. 31, 2024. A man has been charged with first-degree murder and abusing a corpse after his father was found decapitated. Police are investigating a video on social media that allegedly shows him holding up the head. The father was found beheaded in the bathroom of his home in Levittown, on Tuesday night. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
The mother of a Pennsylvania man accused of shooting and beheading his father described from the witness stand on Monday that she found Michael F. Mohn’s body in a first-floor bathroom.
“I believe I screamed,” Denice Mohn said through tears as Justin D. Mohn’s murder trial began in a suburban Philadelphia courtroom. “I was screaming out front. I think I dialed 911.”
She testified she saw her husband when she had been home for lunch earlier. “I said goodbye,” she said. “And I said I’ll see you later.”
Justin Mohn, 33, is accused of killing his father and posting video of his severed head online — and calling for others to help him try to overthrow the U.S. government. He faces charges of murder, abuse of a corpse, terrorism related crimes and other offenses for the January 2024 killing of his father at the Levittown home where the three lived.
Denice Mohn testified that she and her husband had been offering financial support and guidance as Justin Mohn looked for a job. She described her husband’s relationship with him as a “father-son relationship.”
During the first few hours of trial, prosecutors played 911 audio calls from the night Michael Mohn was killed, with a woman screaming in the background. The judge heard neighbor James Carnley testify about helping Denice Mohn after she found her husband. Carnley told a dispatcher that Michael Mohn had no head. Prosecutors played the YouTube video in which Justin Mohn held up his father’s severed head.
Prosecutors described the homicide as “something straight out of a horror film,” and said in an opening statement that Justin Mohn killed his father to intimidate federal workers, calling it a “cold, calculated, organized plan.”
Mohn’s defense attorneys declined to give an opening statement.
Prosecutors have said Justin Mohn shot his father with a pistol he bought the day before the shooting, then decapitated him with a kitchen knife and machete. The 14-minute YouTube video was live for several hours before it was removed.
Evidence presented at the trial before Judge Stephen A. Corr included graphic photos as well as the video that Justin Mohn had posted to YouTube. The judge gave members of the public at the trial a warning about the images and said they could leave before they were shown. The proceedings are known as a bench trial, with only a judge, not a jury, presiding.
Justin Mohn, wearing a brown sport coat, dark shirt and tie, watched the witness testimony and viewed the videos and photos without any apparent reaction.
Mohn was armed with a handgun when arrested later that day after allegedly climbing a 20-foot (6-meter) fence at Fort Indiantown Gap, the state’s National Guard headquarters. He had hoped to get the soldiers to “mobilize the Pennsylvania National Guard to raise arms against the federal government,” Bucks County District Attorney Jennifer Schorn said at a news conference last year.
Mohn had a USB device containing photos of federal buildings and apparent instructions for making explosives when arrested, authorities have said.
He also had expressed violent anti-government rhetoric in writings he published online, and the YouTube video included rants about the government, immigration and the border, fiscal policy, urban crime and the war in Ukraine.
Michael Mohn, who was 68, had been an engineer with the geoenvironmental section of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In the video, Justin Mohn described his father as a 20-year federal employee and called him a traitor.
During a competency hearing last year, a defense expert said Mohn wrote a letter to Russia’s ambassador to the United States seeking a deal to give Mohn refuge and apologizing to President Vladimir Putin for claiming to be the czar of Russia.
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AP reporter Mark Scolforo contributed from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.