Congressman says the man who attacked his staff with a metal bat was looking for him | CBC Radio

When Virginia Congressman Gerry Connolly learned that a man had attacked his staffers with a metal baseball bat on Monday, he says his first emotion was shock. 

That was quickly followed by a deep concern for his outreach director and his new intern, who were both injured in the attack at Connolly’s district office in Fairfax, Va.

“And then I had a strange emotion, I guess. I felt some guilt,” Connolly told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. 

“This man came in asking for me. And my staff suffered physical harm because he couldn’t get to me. And that may seem strange, but I felt bad for them that they took, you know, blows that were intended for me.”

The two women harmed in the assault have been treated for non-life-threatening injuries and released from hospital. A 49-year-old man — who is known to police, and has a history mental illness — is in custody. 

The case has renewed concern about physical violence directed at U.S. lawmakers, as well as people’s ability to access to mental health support.

First day on the job

Connolly, a Democratic U.S. representative, says a man showed up at his office on Monday looking for him. The man had been in contact with his office before, he said, but had never made any threats. 

Connolly’s intern — who was just one hour into her first day on the job — informed the man that the congressman was away at an event.

“Then he started raining blows on her,” Connolly said. “And then he turned his attention to my outreach director, and hit her in the head.”

A third staffer, he says, managed to get the others into a safe room and call 911. Then the attacker started smashing up the office with the bat, destroying a computer, putting a hole in the wall and shattering glass.

Police showed up on the scene within five minutes, Connolly said, subdued the man and took him into custody. 

They were still cleaning blood out of the carpet on Tuesday, Connolly said. 

Connolly says he visited his injured staffers in hospital on Monday, and they were doing “as well as could be expected.”

“But, clearly, they were still in shock. And I think as that wears off, all kinds of emotions come to the fore. And, you know, we’re determined to deal with that as a staff and as a family,” he said.

“We’re going to talk it through. We’re going to get professional help. We’re going to make sure that people have what they need.”

History of violence, lack of supports

The man arrested for the attack did not get the help he needed, according to his father, who lives with him. 

The U.S. Capitol Police and Fairfax City Police identified the alleged attacker as Xuan-Kha Tran Pham, 49, of Fairfax. He was being held without bond on charges of malicious wounding and aggravated malicious wounding. It was not immediately clear if he had an attorney.

Pham’s father, Hy Pham, told the Washington Post his son was schizophrenic and had dealt with mental illness since his late teens. He had been unsuccessfully trying to arrange mental health care for his son. 

“He blamed the FBI for making him sick,” the father said. “He blamed the Navy for making him sick.”

Police have also identified the accused as the suspect in an another attack earlier on Monday. They say a man approached a woman parked in her car about eight kilometres away from Connolly’s office at 10:37 a.m., asked her if was white, then hit her windshield with a bat and ran away. The woman wasn’t injured.

He was also charged last year with assault on a law enforcement officer, resisting arrest and attempting to disarm a law enforcement office. Those charges were later dropped. 

In May 2022, a person whose name and community of residence matches the alleged attacker sued the Central Intelligence Agency in federal court. In a hand-written 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.”

Violence against politicians 

Connolly says he has no reason to believe the attack was politically motivated, but told The Associated Press the “toxic political environment we all live in” may have “set him off.”

In his interview with CBC, Connolly said the attack has him worried about the rise in violence against elected officials in the U.S.

Since the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, threats to lawmakers and their families have increased. The U.S. Capitol Police investigated 10,000 threats to members that year, more than twice the number from four years earlier. They investigated about 7,500 cases in 2022.

In October, a man broke into the San Francisco home of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, demanding to speak with her, before he smashed her husband, Paul, over the head with a hammer.

“Political violence in a constitutional democracy is never justified. That’s why we invented the ballot box. We solve our problems through free and fair elections,” Connolly said.

“It bothers me that there is sort of a different threshold these days for the acceptability of violent rhetoric, violent images that can lead to violence itself. That can never be the answer.”