Frank James’s Sister Says ‘He’s Been on His Own His Whole Life.’

In the videos, between bigoted rants tied tenuously into current events, Mr. James described cross-country travels in the weeks before the attack — a schedule that appeared to end close to the day of the shooting.

In a video posted on March 18, Mr. 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 explained 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, 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, which he referred to as an Airbnb. A spokesman 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 Mr. James.

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.