Law enforcement authorities have identified Joshua Jahn, 29, as the suspected shooter who fired upon a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field office in Dallas early Wednesday morning, killing one detainee and injuring two others.
Jahn, who died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, authorities said, “indiscriminately” opened fire at the facility, including at a van near the sally port, from atop a nearby building before 7 a.m., Wednesday.
While authorities have yet to state an official motive, they also said that they found bullets inscribed with the words “ANTI-ICE” near Jahn’s body, prompting President Donald Trump and Administration officials to call the shooting an attack on the institution over his hardline immigration agenda.
Here’s what we know so far about the shooter.
A Boy Scout from north Texas
The New York Times reported that Jahn had two siblings—a brother and a sister—and lived with his parents as recently as a few months ago. His father, according to a LinkedIn profile, retired in 2020 after 36 years of employment at an elevator and escalator firm. His mother, meanwhile, previously worked at a massage school in Texas, according to a currently inaccessible Facebook profile. Residents described their family to CBS News as of Norwegian background.
Speaking to a local NBC News outlet, Jahn’s brother Noah said he and Joshua were Boy Scouts who grew up in Allen, a northern Texas suburb. Jahn was unemployed but had taken an interest in coding, his brother added. A LinkedIn profile with Joshua Jahn’s name shows affiliation with the Boy Scouts.
Two properties are connected to the shooter: one in Fairview, Texas, and another in Durant, Okla. Jahn’s brother Noah told NBC that they were planning to move to Oklahoma to a property owned by their parents and that the last time he saw his brother was two weeks ago at their parents’ house. Law enforcement officials visited both properties as part of an ongoing investigation.
Previously attended UT Dallas
The LinkedIn profile appearing to be from Jahn also shows that he had attended the University of Texas at Dallas from 2014 to 2015 and Collin College from 2015 to 2017, studying in the fields of mechanical engineering and computer science, respectively.
Collin College confirmed in an email to local media outlet KERA that a student with the same name as Jahn attended on and off until 2018. The University of Texas at Dallas, in a statement to a local ABC affiliate, said that a person with the same name and birthday “briefly attended UT Dallas over a decade ago.”
The LinkedIn profile also shows that Jahn worked for seven months in 2018 and 2019 in Solartime USA, a Texas-based solar energy company. The company’s CEO, Martyna Kowalczyk, told the Associated Press in a statement that Jahn worked at her company for a few months “many years ago.”
Appeared familiar with a rifle
Jahn’s brother Noah told NBC News that the suspect knew how to use their parents’ rifle.
But Noah Jahn claimed that his brother was “not a marksman” and also cast doubt that Jahn would have been able to fire with accuracy from the nearby roof.
Interested in video games and internet culture
Two of Jahn’s friends, who asked not to be identified, told ABC News that they remember him as a person with a deep interest in video games and internet culture.
“This is a complete shock to me,” one of the friends said, adding that Jahn “was the least political” of all the people he knew in high school. “He liked playing video games,” the friend added.
The friends provided ABC News with a username for the gaming platform Steam that they said belonged to Jahn. The Steam profile, ABC News reported, showed its user spent over 10,000 hours playing games like Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead 2, and Rust.
The username is also linked to a Reddit account. ABC News reported that the Reddit account had not been used in around six years and that previous posts point to an interest in gaming and smoking marijuana. A spokesperson for Reddit told ABC News that they’ve “suspended the account out of an abundance of caution” and that they “can’t say for sure whether this account was associated with the suspect.”
TIME could not independently verify the accounts.
Had a drug-related criminal history
Public records indicate Jahn had previously run afoul of the law.
In June 2016, Jahn pleaded guilty to delivery of marijuana weighing between a quarter of an ounce and five pounds, according to public records. He was fined $500 and was placed on probation for five years, but a judge approved an early release in March 2017 based on the recommendation of community supervision officials due to Jahn’s regular reporting and compliance. The legal proceedings were subsequently dismissed.
The AP reported that in late 2017, Jahn drove cross-country for a job involving harvesting marijuana, according to Ryan Sanderson, who owns a legal cannabis farm in Washington state.
“He’s a young kid, a thousand miles from home, didn’t really seem to have any direction, living out of his car at such a young age,” Sanderson told AP. “I don’t remember him being that abnormal. He didn’t seem to fight with anyone or cause trouble. He kept his head down and stayed working.”
A registered independent in Oklahoma
Jahn’s motive hasn’t been ascertained, but many, including Trump Administration officials, have speculated about the suspect’s ideological leanings. Vice President J.D. Vance, speaking at an event in North Carolina, labeled Jahn a “violent left-wing extremist.” Vance added that, based on “some” evidence that he says authorities have not yet made public, “we know this person was politically motivated.”
Jahn’s brother Noah told NBC News that he was not a person Noah would have ever thought would be involved in a politically motivated shooting.
“I didn’t think he was politically interested,” Noah said. “He wasn’t interested in politics on either side as far as I knew.”
Online records show that Jahn was registered to vote as an independent in Oklahoma, where he voted once, in the 2024 general election. The New York Times reported that Jahn voted in a Democratic primary in Texas in March 2020.
But an unnamed fellow Boy Scout trooper also told NBC News that the suspect did sometimes voice his political opinions, recounting a conversation a few years back about migrant caravans entering the country. “He was just upset about how people were not understanding people’s desperation to get out of bad situations and how immigration was being handled as a whole,” the unnamed troop member said.
The troop member, however, was surprised that Jahn was identified as the shooter. “He was pretty against it,” the member said about gun violence, “so that’s why this is making it even more surprising. He was not somebody that would condone those kind of actions.”
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