The man who attacked Rep. Connolly’s staff ruled insane
The man who violently attacked staffers at Rep. Gerry Connolly’s district office in Fairfax last year will go to a psychiatric hospital instead of prison, News4 reports.
Xuan-Kha Tran Pham, 50, had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. The judge accepted the plea after learning Pham had been declared insane at the time of the attack by two doctors and had not been properly medicated.
During the attack, on May 15, 2023, Pham repeatedly hit a congressional staffer in the head with an aluminum baseball bat and struck an intern, who was on her first day on the job, in the ribs. According to NBC4, the intern testified at a hearing last November that he kept repeating “You’re going to die” during the attack.
Pham had been charged with two counts of malicious wounding, one count of assault and battery, and one count of property destruction. The last charge was connected to an incident earlier on May 15 in which he chased a woman on the street and struck her car with the bat before heading to Connolly’s office.
Pham had intended to kill Connolly, but the congressman was not in the office at the time.
Related story: Man arrested for attacking Connolly’s staffers
His defense attorney, Dawn Butorac, told NBC4 that Pham “suffered from delusions about government conspiracies and a variety of other things and he’d gone to a variety of government agencies in an attempt to get help because he believed the government was imprisoning him and all sorts of other things.”
“He’s just very ill and this whole incident is a byproduct of his mental illness, and that’s why he’ll be in a hospital for the foreseeable future,” Butorac said.
In a statement to News4, Connolly said: “Mr. Pham’s history of mental illness is well documented and lasts today. I pray he continues to receive the institutional treatment he needs so that he does not harm anyone else or himself. As a community, however, we must recognize the serious consequences of the inflammatory and violent rhetoric that is too frequently expressed by too many people.”
