“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, Ind., at which point he said he would reach Philadelphia by Tuesday. He said he would stop in a town outside of Pittsburgh next, then Harrisburg and Philadelphia.
Mr. James said in that video that he planned to spend six days in a hotel, and then transfer to a short-term rental.
Once in Philadelphia, Mr. 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, Mr. 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 April 15. But in a video three days later, he gave a tour of a short term rental, which he says he moved into on March 29 and planned to call home for the next 15 days. Though it is unclear whether Mr. James was counting the day he moved in or not, the day of the shooting, April 12, was 15 days after March 29.
The owner of a property in North Philadelphia, Janet McDaniel, confirmed that Mr. James had rented her home, using a short-term rental platform, Evolve.
Susan C. Beachy and Kitty Bennett contributed research.
