The mother of the Pennsylvania man accused of decapitating his father and sharing a video of the severed head online described their connection as a typical “father-son relationship” — and said nothing could have prepared her for the horror of finding her husband’s headless body in the bathroom.
“I could not see this coming,” Denice Mohn testified Monday, on the first day of Justin Mohn’s murder trial held outside Philadelphia, the Bucks County Courier Times reported.
Mohn, 33, never showed any signs of violent behavior, his mother said, adding she never saw any tensions between the two men, except for the typical friction that may occur when adult children live at home.
He was “pretty passive,” his mother noted.
Prosecutors, however, painted a different picture of the defendant, who’s been charged with first-degree murder, abuse of a corpse and other offenses for the January 2024 killing of 68-year-old Michael F. Mohn in the family’s Levittown home.
Referring to the shocking homicide as “something straight out of a horror film,” Bucks County Assistant District Attorney Ashley Towhey said in an opening statement that Justin Mohn carried out a “cold, calculated, organized plan” designed to intimidate federal workers.
An autopsy found that the victim was shot in the head before he was decapitated using a machete and knife. According to investigators, after the alleged murder, Mohn posted a 14-minute video on YouTube, in which he was seen “picking up the decapitated head of his father [and] identifying him by name and as his father.”
When appearing at the Bucks County Justice Center for a preliminary hearing on Sept. 10, 2024, a smiling Mohn told reporters he had carried out the killing because his father was a longtime federal employee and had “betrayed” him.
“I and a lot of other people around America believe that the federal government has betrayed America, they are destroying the country and we have to do something to take our country back,” he told NBC Philadelphia.
