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Even as Frank R. James, the 62-year-old man suspected by the police of opening fire in a crowded subway car, was taken into custody in the early afternoon on Wednesday, new details about his troubled life began to emerge, including a criminal history in at least two states.

Mr. James was charged in New Jersey in the 1990s with two counts of making terroristic threats and was eventually convicted of harassment, a lesser charge. He was found guilty of harassment by a judge. He was sentenced to probation and to receive further counseling. Details were sparse in the court documents relating to his case and the identity of his target was redacted.

Officials said that he had also been arrested several times in New York for a number of offenses, including at least one charge of criminal sex act.

It is unclear how closely connected Mr. James was with his family. In two brief telephone interviews, Mr. James’s sister, Catherine James Robinson, said that her brother had “been on his own his whole life,” and that she had little contact with him.

She confirmed several details about her brother, including that he was born in the Bronx in 1959, and that he often moved from city to city, never remaining in any one place for too long.

But she said that she spoke to him 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, she said.

Still, she said she was “surprised” to see him named as a suspect in Tuesday’s shooting.

“I don’t think he would do anything like that,” she said. “That’s not in his nature to do anything like that.”

Asked if her brother had sought mental health treatment, Ms. Robinson said he was not mentally ill, and bristled at the suggestion. “There was a lot that went on through our lives,” she said. Later, Ms. Robinson added that their mother had died when Mr. James was 5 years old.

She mentioned that Mr. 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 prior.

And she said that Mr. James did not fit the description the police had released on Tuesday about the suspect: a man about 5 feet 5 inches, and heavyset. She said her brother was over six feet tall and about 300 pounds, and that he had a bad back.

While Mr. James initially proved elusive, he left plenty of evidence for investigators to comb through in the videos he posted to YouTube and Facebook.

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.

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.