The sister of Frank R. James, the 62-year-old man suspected by police of opening fire in a crowded subway on Tuesday, said in an interview Wednesday that her brother had “been alone all his life.” and that she had little contact with him.
The sister, Catherine James Robinson, confirmed several details about her brother, including that he was born in 1959 in the Bronx, that he was 62, and that he often moved from city to city, never staying in one place for too long.
But in a brief phone interview, she said she spoke to her brother on the phone only occasionally and didn’t know what he did for work. They hadn’t seen each other face to face in a long time.
Still, she said she was “surprised” to see him as a suspect in Tuesday’s shooting.
“I don’t think he would do such a thing,” she said. “It’s not in his nature to do something like that.”
When asked if her brother had sought mental health treatment, Ms Robinson said he was not mentally ill, and she was angry at the suggestion. “A lot has happened in our lives,” she says.
She said Mr James had appeared on podcasts and YouTube, ostensibly alluding to the suspect’s prolific posts on social media.
She said the last time she spoke to her brother on the phone was after their younger sister, Barbara Jean Grey, died of a heart attack several years earlier.
And she said Mr. James did not fit the description police released about the suspect, who police said Tuesday was about six feet tall and heavily built. She said her brother was over six feet tall and about 300 pounds, and that he had a bad back.
The police have had little luck in tracking down Mr. James. But he left a lot of evidence, including in the videos he posted on YouTube and Facebook.
In the videos, between bigoted diatribes closely tied to current events, Mr James described traveling across the country in the weeks before the attack — a schedule that seemed to end close to the day of the shooting.
In a video posted on Sunday, March 20, Mr. James explained that he had packed up his apartment, emptied his storage space, and made his way early to Philadelphia, where he planned to move. While filming himself from a rented U-Haul van, he said he was leaving Wisconsin, where he had at least one address.
“While driving, I just think because I’m going back into the danger zone, so to speak, and of course it raises a lot of negative thoughts, because I’m suffering from – a severe 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, Ind., where he said he would reach Philadelphia by Tuesday. He planned to spend six days in a hotel and then move to an Airbnb. But an Airbnb spokesperson, Christopher Nulty, said the company has investigated and confirmed that “no Airbnb accounts or reservations have been linked to any identifiable information currently available” about Mr. James.
By his own account, Mr. James had some housing problems. In a video posted on March 27, he said a heater had blown where he was staying and he had to move to another room.
Susan C. Beachy† Kitty Bennett and Kirsten Noyes research contributed.
