Mentally ill man who allegedly attacked Rep. Gerry Connolly's staff has violent history, police say
Authorities said that a mentally ill man who attacked Rep. Gerry Connolly's district office — shattering windows and striking two women, one of whom was an intern — first chased and threatened a woman with a metal baseball bat in a northern Virginia neighborhood.
Connolly's staff managed to shelter in an inner office until officers arrived, within five minutes. Connolly said they used a stun gun to subdue the man, identified as Xuan-Kha Tran Pham, 49, of Fairfax. He was held without bond at the Fairfax County Adult Detention Center on charges of malicious wounding and aggravated malicious wounding. It was not immediately clear if he had an attorney pending his first appearance Tuesday.
Pham, 49, has been violent before, attacking police officers last year. His father, Hy Pham, told The Washington Post his son is schizophrenic and has 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 shows 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 Democratic congressman, who wasn't in the office at the time, said in an interview.
Connolly said his staffers — an intern was struck in the side and an outreach director was hit on the head — were released after hospital treatment. One Fairfax police officer involved in detaining Pham also received treatment, for a minor injury, police spokesperson Sgt. Lisa Gardner said.
"At this time, it is not clear what the suspect's motivation may have been," Capitol Police said in a statement announcing a joint investigation with Fairfax City Police.
Police said the man is suspected in a separate attack a short time earlier Monday.
Pham's other alleged attacks earlier Monday
Fairfax County Police said a man later identified as Pham approached a woman parked in her car about five miles (eight kilometers) away from Connolly's office at 10:37 a.m. The man asked the woman if she was white, then hit her windshield with a bat and ran away, according to police.
Connolly told CBS News "he'd never been to the office," but he said that he had previously contacted the office. "There was a contact of where he called for help on a case that was bizarre. … There was no connection between that and what happened this morning."
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."
Suing the CIA
In May 2022, a person whose name and community of residence matches Xuan-Kha Pham's sued the Central Intelligence Agency in federal court.
According to court records, in a handwritten, nonsensical complaint, the plaintiff alleged the CIA "wrongfully imprisoned me in a lower perspective" and accused the agency of "brutally torturing me with a degenerating disability consistently since 1988 till the present from the fourth dimension." Pham asked that he "be cured and returned to normal condition by a digital technology and compensated for my extreme suffering and losses in the amount of $29,000,000." The Justice Department sought to dismiss the case in March.
Assaulting officers
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.
Pham was charged with assault on a law enforcement officer, resisting arrest and attempting to disarm a law enforcement officer, but the charges were eventually dropped when he entered an agreement designed to ensure he received mental health treatment, according to a person with the Fairfax County Commonwealth's Attorney's office who spoke on condition of anonymity because Pham now has an ongoing criminal case.
Pham complied with conditions requiring him to seek treatment from his arrest in January through a nine-month period when the charges were dropped in September, the person said.
Connolly, currently serving his eighth term representing Virginia's Fairfax County-based 11th District in the Washington suburbs, said officers had to subdue the man with a taser.
"He was very violent and agitated. He's obviously somebody suffering from serious mental illness but it does underscore for all of us the vulnerability potentially of our district offices because we don't have the level of security we have here on Capital Hill," Connolly said.
Caitlin Yilek and Nikole Killion contributed to this report.