Racist. Anti-Semitic. Unhinged.
The person of interest in Tuesday’s shooting on the New York City subway is a prolific user of social media, regularly uploading lengthy, often racist diatribes to both YouTube and Facebook in which he addresses a range of topics from the state of race relations in the United States to the policies of New York City Mayor Eric Adams, according to videos reviewed by Rolling Stone.
Frank R. James, 62, has not been officially named as suspect in the incident, which took place in Brooklyn during morning rush hour aboard a Manhattan-bound N train between 59th and 36th streets around 8:30 a.m. “We are endeavoring to locate him to determine his connection to the subway shooting, if any,” said James Essig, NYPD Chief of Detectives, during a news conference Tuesday.
One of the photos of James released by NYPD was taken from a recently uploaded YouTube video titled “STOP ONE COMPLETE,” which was posted to a channel called “prophet oftruth88.” A Facebook page under the name “profitofdoom008” contains videos similar to those posted to the “prophet oftruth88” YouTube channel, some of which feature an individual sporting identical clothing worn in the YouTube videos, and the page also includes a playlist titled “PROPHETOFTRUTH88.” Although the man in videos uploaded to both the YouTube and Facebook accounts never identifies himself by name, he bears a strong resemblance to photos of James distributed by authorities. In a news conference Tuesday, NYPD commissioner Keechant Sewell stated Mayor Adams’ security detail has been bolstered “in light of the videos,” the New York Times reported — thus indirectly confirming the link between James and the disturbing social media posts.
In his videos — which number in the hundreds and feature titles such as “why we need more racial profiling,” “should the black woman be forcibly sterilized,” and “TO KILL OR NOT TO KILL” — James often rails against numerous racial and ethnic groups, including whites, Blacks, Jews and Latinos. He also compares people of color to “a bunch of turds in a toilet,” waiting to be “flushed” down the drain by society and implies that a race war between whites and Blacks is imminent.
“White people and Black people should not have any contact with each other,” he says in a March 23 video titled, “born in an insane asylum.” “Their anger is building up. Nothing can happen here differently than what happened over in Europe with the Jews. I want you to believe that that’s possible.”
In a March 2 video named “I TOLD YOU SO,” James uses a news segment on recent subway attacks as a segue into an attack on Mayor Adams’ policies against crime and homelessness, seemingly implying that his struggles are a direct result of the failures of New York City social services.
“These are the people that was supposed to be helping me. They made me worse,” he says, gesturing to a computer screen opened to a photo file named “THEM HOSE,” which appears to display headshots of employees of New Jersey’s Bridgeway Behavioral Health Services — an organization James references in numerous videos. “They made me fucking worse. They made me more dangerous than I could ever — than anything, anyone could ever fucking imagine. These are the people that Eric Adams wants to send out to help the homeless and whatever the case may be. It ain’t gonna happen.”
James then goes on to describe the individuals as Adams’ “calvary,” before launching into a homophobic and anti-Semitic screed against the South Bronx Mental Health Council and Albert Einstein College of Medicine. “A bunch of fucking predators. A bunch of deviants. A bunch of psychopath and sociopathic fucking bitches,” he says. “They’re going to help you, Eric.”
In the same video, James mocks the mayor’s subway safety plan rolled out earlier this year, going so far as to suggest he could easily commit a crime in a subway station without being caught. “He can’t stop no fucking crime in no subways. He may slow it down, but he ain’t stopping shit,” he says, adding that the large number of entry and exit points from subway stations would make apprehending criminals nearly impossible. “With this program in place, with all these police — I’d still get off. I know I could get off, because they can’t be everywhere… Those who go on to commit crimes, like shooting? That means you have to have police in every station, and that’s not possible.”
James regularly details his struggles with mental health in recent videos — most notably in his final upload, “DOMESTICATED AVERAGES,” posted April 11, which serves as an eerie precursor to Tuesday’s shooting. “I’ve been through a lot of shit, where I can say I wanted to kill people. I wanted to watch people die right in front of my fucking face immediately,” he says. “But, I thought about the fact that, ‘Hey man, I don’t wanna go to no fucking prison.’ Fuck that…So, I had to absorb the bullshit. Even though it was building up inside me, what could I do? Not much.”
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