Alleged attacker of congressman’s staff had history of mental illness, police say
A man who allegedly attacked two congressional workers with a metal baseball bat had a history of mental illness and had assaulted someone else earlier in the day, authorities said.
The man, identified as Xuan-Kha Tran Pham, 49, of Fairfax, Virginia, attacked the Democratic congressman Gerry Connolly’s office on Monday, shattering windows and striking two women, including an intern on her first day on the job, authorities said.
Staffers then managed to shelter in an inner office until officers arrived, within five minutes. Connolly said they used a stun gun to subdue Pham.
Pham, 49, has been violent before, attacking police officers last year. His father, Hy Pham, told the Washington Post his son was schizophrenic and had dealt with mental illness since his late teens. He said he had been trying, without success, to arrange mental health care for his son.
The father could not immediately be reached by the Associated Press.
None of the injuries Pham inflicted were life-threatening, but Connolly said it showed how vulnerable public servants are in an era when political rhetoric has become more bellicose.
“I have no reason to believe that his motivation was politically motivated, but it is possible that the sort of toxic political environment we all live in, you know, set him off, and I would just hope all of us would take a little more time to be careful about what we say and how we say it,” the veteran Democratic congressman, who was not in the office at the time, said in an interview.
Connolly said his staffers were released after hospital treatment. One Fairfax police officer involved in detaining Pham also received treatment, for a minor injury, a police spokesperson, Sgt Lisa Gardner, said.
Police said the man was suspected of a separate attack a short time earlier on Monday.
Fairfax county police said a man later identified as Pham approached a woman parked in her car about five miles (8km) away from Connolly’s office at 10.37am. The man asked the woman if she was white, then hit her windshield with a bat and ran away, according to police.
A video recorded on a neighbor’s home camera system at the same site shows a man with a bat chasing a woman who can be heard screaming. Dan Ashley, the homeowner, said it was “troubling to see this sort of thing happening in the neighborhood”.
In May 2022, a person whose name and community of residence matches Xuan-Kha Tran Pham’s sued the Central Intelligence Agency in federal court.
In a handwritten complaint, the plaintiff alleged the CIA had been “wrongfully imprisoning me in a lower perspective” and “brutally torturing me with a degenerating disability consistently since 1988 till the present from the fourth dimension”.
Last year, officers responded to a Fairfax home after a man called dispatch saying he wished to harm others, Fairfax county police said in a statement. Pham assaulted responding officers and attempted to take a firearm, according to the statement. It said the officers sustained minor injuries.
Since the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol, threats to lawmakers and their families have increased sharply. The US Capitol police investigated about 7,500 cases of potential threats against members of Congress in 2022. The year before, they investigated about 10,000 threats to members, more than twice the number from four years earlier.
In October, a man broke into the San Francisco home of the then House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, demanding to speak with her, before he smashed her husband, Paul, over the head with a hammer.