The man sought by the NYPD in Tuesday’s subway shooting recorded a video message to Mayor Eric Adams in which he said he had been through the city’s mental-health system and experienced a kind of emotional violence that would make someone “go and get a gun and shoot motherfuckers.”
Frank James, 62, who Adams on Wednesday morning identified as the suspect in the Brooklyn attack, recorded and uploaded dozens of lengthy diatribes on race, politics, and gun violence to a YouTube channel under the username prophetoftruth88, which had more than 300 subscribers.
In the videos, James offers commentary on major news events from Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars to Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination to the war in Ukraine. In most of the videos, however, James seems to express his disdain for Black people—often calling them “cattle” and racial slurs—and talks about his desire to “kill people,” even describing himself as a “prophet of doom.”
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“[N-words] should be wiped off the planet, even though I am one,” James says in one video.
James also dabbled in at least one conspiracy theory, calling the 9/11 terror attacks “the most beautiful day, probably in the history of this fucking world.”
One of his sisters, Catherine James, told The Daily Beast on Tuesday that she hasn’t spoken to her brother in a few years, adding that he “kept to himself.”
“I don’t know what might have been his motivation. Last I spoke to him was like three years ago,” James said. “We don’t keep in contact with each other… I don’t know what he was thinking, I don’t know anything about why he might have done what he did.”
In a press conference Tuesday evening, Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell said a number of “concerning posts” had been found online in connection to the investigation, though she declined to directly confirm that they had been made by James. The posts addressed topics such as homelessness, New York, and Adams, Sewell said, adding that the mayor’s protective detail would be increased as a precautionary measure.
Police say the suspect, wearing a neon green nylon vest and a gray hoodie, set off two smoke bombs and opened fire on a northbound subway train during rush hour, sparking chaos as it pulled into the 36th Street station in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and sending commuters “running for their lives.”
As the gunman fled the scene, an NYPD supervisor previously told The Daily Beast that he ditched a handgun and three extended-capacity magazines. NBC and ABC also reported the suspect also left behind a backpack, a bag of fireworks and smoke canisters, a hatchet, a spray bottle of gasoline, and one round jammed in the gun, which possibly prevented him from causing more bloodshed.
At least 10 people, including seven men and three women, were shot during the attack on Monday morning, and 19 others were wounded in the chaos. Five of the gunshot victims were in critical but stable condition on Tuesday, and none had life-threatening injuries, officials said. A 14-year-old is among the injured, an NYPD official told The Daily Beast.
William Weimer, vice president and general counsel at Phantom Fireworks, confirmed to The Daily Beast that James bought “smoke items” last June at the company’s Racine, Wisconsin, location that Weimer believes may have been used in Tuesday morning’s attack.
“There was a photo that somebody sent me that made its way around social media of a bag with fireworks products in it. We identified four items in that bag that we sell at Phantom Fireworks... [and] Frank James purchased all four items seen in that bag,” Weimer told The Daily Beast.
“There was an item called Canister Smoke, which is a white smoke device. You light it and it shoots out a lot of white smoke. I don’t know if that’s the smoke that he used, but it could be,” Weimer added.
While police did not detail what led them to identify James as a person of interest, citing their ongoing investigation, his YouTube channel provides a window into the mindset of the 62-year-old with ties to Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
“I made up my mind, kind of told myself, you know, I may have to hurt somebody one day, somebody may have to get hurt,” James says in one rambling 44-minute video viewed by The Daily Beast. “Because there’s no way that I’m going to do what society asks me to do, which is to try to be—to work hard to play fair, keep my nose to the old grindstone, pull myself by the bootstraps, you know, go to work, pay my taxes, do everything you asked me to do, and then you’re going to smack me in the face.”
In the video, James seems to take direct aim at Adams, warning him that his “blueprint for ending gun violence” was “doomed to fail.”
“Because I see some serious flaws in his plan,” James says. “I don’t know about some of it. I know part of it is definitely flawed and it’s doomed to failure.”
James then zeroes in on the mental health component of Adams’ plan.
“The other thing he talked about, of course, was the issue of mental health,” James says in the video. “I’m also an expert on that, because—not only am I an expert, but I’m also a fucking patient. A mental health patient as well.” In a separate video, recording himself as he drives what appears to be a large van or truck, James claims he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.
“I have been in crisis, as a patient. I have a diagnosis that goes back to 1980, and I have been in crisis. I have acted out, so to speak, to the point where I had to be locked up because I was using illegal narcotics, I’ll just say.” James adds that he hasn’t “had an episode since that time.”
James also notes that he has spent time in the city’s mental health day treatment centers, stating that those places are filled with “violence, not physical violence, but the same kind of violence that’s similar to what a child may experience in grade school.” He then goes on to describe a situation in which “people keep talking and picking, picking, picking to the point where they go and get a gun and shoot motherfuckers. That kind of violence.”
The same sentiment against New York City’s leadership is mirrored in a Jan. 26 video in which James slams the rise of crime on the subway—and claims he’d “still get off” even if he sees officers on the tracks.
“He can’t stop no crime in no subways,” James says. “He may slow it down but he ain’t stopping it.”
In a Jan. 1, 2020, video on Facebook, James goes into detail about how he was addicted to New York City prostitutes from the 1980s until at late as 2002. “It had to be a specific type of streetwalker,” James says, adding that “the girls I used to go out with, the ones that really had to be booked, they’re no longer available.”
In a March 25 video, James is seen driving through Philadelphia—where he reportedly rented the U-Haul van cops say he drove to New York. James is then seen in another clip in a hotel room in New Jersey.
“This is where I’m at, the Best Western of Bordentown,” James said. “Here I am, back, back, back in the place where all my troubles started,” he continues.
“The state of fucking stinking New Jersey, sitting here in Bordentown the next couple of days. And as you saw, the end of my journey, or part of the end of my journey, in Philadelphia, at my storage facility, getting everything put away.”
James adds that he was only going to be in New Jersey “for a couple of days” and that he got into town the day before. “It’s time,” he says. “Damage is just too deep. Damage is just way too fucking deep. And so I think the second phase of what took place on 9/11 is about to take place. And that’s why Putin’s over here saber-rattling.”
In a video posted on Monday, titled “DOMESTICATED AVERAGES,” James is seen drinking white overproof rum in a skull shot glass while he rants on everything from slavery to Harriet Beecher Stowe.
“I’ve been through a lot of shit. I can say I wanted to kill people. I wanted to watch people die right in my fucking face,” James says at one point. “But I thought about... I don’t want to go to fucking prison.”
