Brooklyn subway shooting suspect Frank R. James, 62. Photo / NYPD via The New York Times
Brooklyn subway shooting suspect Frank R. James, 62. Photo / NYPD via The New York Times
The sister of Frank R. James, who is suspected by police of opening fire in a crowded New York subway car on Tuesday, says her brother has "been on his own his whole life" and that she has little contact with him.
The sister, Catherine James Robinson, confirmed several detailsabout her brother, including that he was born in the Bronx borough of New York in 1959, that he was 62 and that he often moved from city to city, never remaining in any one place for too long.
But in a brief telephone interview, she said that she spoke to her brother only occasionally on the phone and that she did not know what he did for work. They had not seen each other face-to-face in a long time.
Still, Robinson said she was "surprised" to see him named as a suspect in Tuesday's shooting.
NYPD officers handcuff subway shooting suspect Frank R. James in Greenwich Village, New York City on April 13, 2022. Photo / AP
She mentioned that James had appeared on podcasts and YouTube, seemingly referring to the suspect's prolific posts on social media.
She said the last time she had spoken to her brother on the phone was after the death of their younger sister, Barbara Jean Grey, from a heart attack several years ago.
And she said that James did not fit the description police had released Tuesday about the suspect: a man about 5 feet, 5 inches, and heavyset. She said that her brother was over 6 feet tall and about 300 pounds, and that he had a bad back.
Police have had little luck tracking down James. But he left plenty of evidence behind, partly in the videos he posted to YouTube and Facebook.
In the videos, between bigoted rants tied tenuously into current events, James described cross-country travels in the weeks before the attack — a schedule that appeared to end close to the day of the shooting.
Passengers run from a smoke-filled subway car after the shooting. Photo / Will B Wylde via AP
In a video posted on March 18, James said he picked up a Penske van and was planning to leave Milwaukee the following day. Two days later, shooting a video from the road, he said that he had packed up his apartment, emptied his storage and set out early on a trip to Philadelphia, where he was planning to move. Filming himself from the rented van, he said he was leaving Wisconsin, where he had at least one address.
"On the drive I'm just thinking because I'm heading back into the danger zone, so to speak, and it's triggering a lot of negative thoughts, of course, because I do suffer from — have a bad case of post-traumatic stress from all the things I've been through," he said in the video.
He stopped for the night in Fort Wayne, Indiana, at which point he said he would reach Philadelphia by Tuesday. He said he would stop in a town outside Pittsburgh next, then Harrisburg and Philadelphia.
James said in that video that he planned to spend six days in a hotel and then transfer to a short-term rental, which he referred to as an Airbnb. A spokesperson for Airbnb, Christopher Nulty, said that the company had investigated and confirmed that there were "no Airbnb accounts or reservations associated with any of the identifiable information currently available" on James.
Police and FBI investigators examine the van rented by Frank R. James. Photo / Dakota Santiago, The New York Times
Once in Philadelphia, James said he was driving to a storage locker facility to store his belongings. He then gave a brief tour of a hotel room in New Jersey.
"All my troubles started in the state of stinking New Jersey," he said, using an expletive.
By his own account, James was having some housing trouble. In a video posted March 27, he said that a heater had blown where he was staying and that he had to move to another room.
In that video, he said he was planning to move into a short-term rental, where he planned to be until this Friday. But in a video three days later, he gave a tour of a short-term rental, which he says he moved into March 29 and plans to call home for the next 15 days. Although it is unclear whether James was counting the day he moved in or not, the day of the shooting, Tuesday, was 15 days after March 29.
