Beheading of Levittown dad leaves community shaken. Neighbor says son was 'a time bomb'

Justin Mohn was a walker.

He walked constantly around his Levittown neighborhood off Frosty Hollow Road. But as much as he walked, passing house after house, passing neighbor after neighbor, they didn’t know him.

“I guess you’d say we knew of him,” said one man.

But many agreed, there was something off about him.

“Probably the hours that he walked,” said a neighbor, Jon, who, like most on Upper Orchard Drive, declined to give a last name. “He walked at all hours. He walked all day. He never stopped walking.”

One man said Mohn seemed consumed by something.

“Lost in his thoughts,” he said, adding, “basically a time bomb.”

Mohn, 32, exploded Tuesday when, police said, he beheaded his father, Michael, 68, then switched on a camera, recorded and posted a YouTube video of a nearly 15-minute political rant, calling his father a “traitor” for having been a federal government employee. He was a civil engineer for the Army Corps of Engineers.

He held up his father’s severed head, wrapped in a plastic bag, and dumped it in a cooking pot. Police said they found a machete and large knife in the bathtub next to where they found Michael Mohn's body.

Afterward, he fled to Fort Indiantown Gap, 100 miles west, where he was apprehended at the military installation there after scaling a fence, police said. Mohn has been charged with first-degree murder, possession of an instrument of crime and abuse of corpse

Wednesday morning, as Middletown police left and news media arrived, residents of the of Upper Orchard tried to get on with their day. But the shock was palpable. People would not answer doors, or had little to say if they did.

“No, didn’t really know him. Knew his family. They were nice. You know, ‘Hi’ and wave when you see them. That’s the kind of neighborhood this is,” said Ed, who lives several houses down from the Mohns.

But with Justin, the youngest of four siblings, there was something troubling.

“There were rumors,” said Joyce Prickett, who lives down the street. “He was anti-government. Anti-military. He had strange posts online. That’s what you heard.”

He regularly walked past her house, usually on the opposite side of the street.

More: Fed or patsy: Conspiracy theorists converge on beheading murder. Why that's not uncommon.

“He wore bright colors,” she said. “I thought it was odd that, in the middle of the day, he was walking not working.”

Police said they had “several contacts” with Mohn over the years, but nothing serious or criminal. He now remains in police custody at the Bucks County jail in Doylestown, awaiting his next hearing.

All of the neighbors said they were especially sad for Denice Mohn, who found her husband when she returned home after several hours. She and her husband had lived in the quiet neighborhood since 1985, according to public records.

“I don’t know how you return to that house and live,” said a man several doors away. “My heart breaks for her.”

“The whole neighborhood is shocked by this, and very sad," Prickett said. “I think what we’re all thinking now is what can we do for her? What can we do? We’re in shock.”

A woman named Alexis, drove up to the Mohn house and took a bouquet of flowers to the front door. No one was home. She left them on the front step.

“I feel so sorry,” she said. “I wanted to do something. Anything.”

She returned to her car and drove off, looking as if she would burst into tears.

Bart DeHaven said he called police a handful of times since the summer after Mohn sat on a raised manhole cover in a park directly across the street from his home and stared at his house.

“It’s just sad,” DeHaven said. “He should have got some kind of help.”

Carrie McCarthy said she saw him walking frequently and sitting in the wooded area in the neighborhood. She said someone sent her the YouTube video, which left her stunned.

“I screamed. I totally screamed,” she said. “I opened the video and I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s the guy I see every day, and I knew something was unhinged.’”

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: Beheading suspect Justin Mohn worried Levittown neighbors ahead of murder