The shooter who attacked a Dallas ICE facility on Wednesday, killing one migrant and injuring two others, was once described by his former boss as a laid-back marijuana addict who used to run pot from Washington to Texas. Joshua Jahn, 29, opened fire from a rooftop on a bus carrying migrants into a Dallas ICE facility under federal escort before taking his own life.
Jahn was found dead on the rooftop, loaded with ammunition. Back in 2017, he worked a short-lived job on a legal cannabis farm in Benton City, where his former boss recalled him as an aimless drifter, more interested in smoking weed than putting in serious work.
Strange Mindset
"He was all about the weed. He wanted to be part of the scene. He lived in his car while he helped," Ryan Sanderson, 49, who runs Golden Leaf farm, told The New York Post. "He was just a young kid. When the job was over, he drove back to Texas."
Sanderson, who supervised Jahn during a three-week harvest, said the future gunman didn't appear to care much about politics — or really about anything other than marijuana.
"He would come to work. He didn't say a whole lot. He wasn't an exceptional worker by any stretch," Sanderson said.
"We never talked about politics or any of that kind of stuff. Nobody did."
Jahn was one of the 15 workers on the crew, spending his days trimming leaves and listening to music during the harvest. "There are people who work, and there are people who go through the motions. He was one of those guys. He didn't work that hard, probably because he was too high," the boss recalled.
"What I believe happened is he was selling weed and then he came up here to work in the weed industry because he was all about it and that fizzled out," he said.
"Then he had to go home. It wasn't legal in Texas. I understand he worked at a solar plant. That's kinda a 180, that's a dirty, hardworking job ... He probably didn't have any direction, any work."
Sanderson believes Jahn may have had another motive for traveling all the way to Washington to take on the short-term job.
"I just thought it was weird that someone would drive all the way to Texas to work at a temporary job. But now knowing that he was selling cannabis down in Texas and got in trouble prior to coming up here, I have a sense that his motive was to come up here and get weed," Sanderson said.
Mysterious Character
"The job was for a three-week harvest, and then I kinda felt bad for him because he wanted to keep working, but I didn't have a lot of work. I kept him on for three more months, trying to find more work for him," he recalled.
"Eventually, I couldn't justify keeping him because he wasn't an all-star by any stretch."
Back in 2015, Jahn was arrested for possessing marijuana, years before his stint on the cannabis farm.
Authorities say Wednesday's shooting at the Dallas ICE processing center is being investigated as a targeted attack. they found a stripper clip of ammo near Jahn's body marked with the words "Anti-ICE," while his old Toyota Corolla had a strange nuclear fallout map taped to the side.
Investigators also uncovered a handwritten note in which Jahn wrote, "Hopefully this will give ICE agents real terror, to think, 'is there a sniper with AP [armor piercing] rounds on that roof?'"
Records show Jahn was a registered independent. He voted in the 2020 Democratic primary and cast his last ballot in 2024. His family said he was familiar with firearms.
Investigators are still working to determine whether politics played a role in the shooting. Jahn's mother, Sharon, had posted several anti-gun rants on Facebook, criticizing Texas Republican lawmakers for backing the Second Amendment.
A relative told The New York Post that Jahn wasn't some radical leftist and didn't harbor hatred toward immigration agents, even though "Anti-ICE" was scrawled on a bullet and a note with similar language was found by the FBI.
Looking back to 2017, however, Sanderson said Jahn didn't stand out as unusual at all.
"I thought, 'God, what happened to him?' He didn't seem like somebody who would do something like that, but you never know who people are," he recalled after learning Jahn was the gunman.
"Then something took a turn for the worse because he ballooned up in size, he gained a bunch of weight, probably just being miserable," he added upon seeing his photo. "That's just my take on it."
"He was just your typical 21-year-old who liked to smoke weed."
