Dallas ICE facility shooter feared radiation exposure: Records

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The parents of a 29-year-old gunman who opened fire at a Dallas immigration center in September told police their son was “perfectly normal” before he moved to Washington state and returned home several years ago believing he had radiation sickness, according to newly released reports.

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According to a report written by a Fairview Police Department officer, Joshua Yang began wearing cotton gloves to avoid contact with plastic and practiced target shooting with a newly purchased rifle in Oklahoma a month before the fatal attack on the roof of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building.

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Yang killed two detainees and wounded another before committing suicide during a shootout on September 24.

The records obtained by The Associated Press through a public records request do not provide any indication of what may have motivated the attack. Federal authorities previously said Yang wrote “ANTI-ICE” on the bullet and left handwritten notes indicating he wanted to ambush and terrorize ICE agents.

New records show that on the day of the shooting, Yang's parents told the FBI that he “occasionally discussed current events” with his mother but rarely participated in the conversations. His parents said he was a “loner” who was “obsessed” with artificial intelligence technology. The parents, Andrew and Sharon Yang, did not immediately respond to text and phone messages from the AP on Monday.

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The documents portray Yang as an unemployed, lonely young man who lost himself in playing computer games in his bedroom at his parents' home in suburban Dallas. According to his parents, Jan has not been diagnosed or treated for any mental or physical disorders.

Neither police nor the FBI immediately responded to requests for comment. The FBI said only that due to the government shutdown, it was focused on national security, violations of federal law and critical public safety functions.

Parents noticed changes after moving to Texas

Ian was “perfectly normal” until he returned from Washington state in the last five years, his parents said. He previously attended classes at a Texas community college for years and then traveled across the country to answer an online ad for a seasonal job harvesting marijuana at a legal cannabis farm in Washington. Ian appeared aimless and slept in his car for months, farm owner Ryan Sanderson previously told the AP.

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After returning from Washington, unable to keep his job, Ian's parents told the FBI that he believed he had a “plastic allergy” and was trying to avoid direct skin contact with the material. The county where he worked in Washington state was one of the sites of the secret Manhattan Project to develop atomic bombs. And they said their son became convinced that while in Washington he had been “exposed to radiation from a nearby facility and was suffering from radiation sickness.”

Photos from the shooting scene show a car with a map depicting radioactive fallout in the United States.

Judging by the records, his family life was far from harmonious. Ian's father pressured his older brother to get a job or join the military after high school, and his mother called police when his brother failed to show up for a meeting with an Army recruiter to sign enlistment papers in 2014, police records show.

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Ian's mother called the police on his sister one morning as she slept instead of going to high school, moved away from home for several weeks as a teenager and once spray-painted an expletive on the driveway of the family home.

But the Jans financially supported Joshua, their youngest son, while he stayed in his second-floor bedroom and played computer games.

Shooting practice in Oklahoma

About a month before Yang attacked the ICE facility, he went with his father for target practice on their property in Durant, Oklahoma, where they are building a new home. Although Ian's father owned several guns, he was surprised to see his son pull an “old rifle” out of the car. Yang told his father that he “recently” bought a gun online, police records show.

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His mother told the FBI she had “no idea” her son had a gun, records show.

The FBI previously said Yang legally obtained the bolt-action rifle used in the shooting. But the police reports do not say whether this was the gun Yang used to shoot the targets.

Analysts at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which works on issues of hate and extremism and operates a program organized by the Center for Internet Security, said they discovered that Yang was playing online games under the username “Frank Henniker.” The username appears to be a misspelled reference to the cold and calculating character from Kurt Vonnegut's 1963 satirical novel. Cat's cradleabout politics, religion and nuclear proliferation.

Steam, a game distribution platform, shows that Ian has spent more than 11,000 hours playing first-person shooter and survival games.

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