This undated mugshot provided by the Fairfax City Police Department shows Xuan-Kha Tran Pham. On Monday, May 15, 2023, a man with a metal baseball bat walked into the northern Virginia office of U.S. Rep. Gerry Connolly, asked for him, and struck two of his workers with the bat, police and the congressman said. The U.S. Capitol Police and Fairfax City Police identified the suspect as Xuan-Kha Tran Pham, 49, of Fairfax. FAIRFAX, Va.
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. “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.Fairfax County Police said a man later identified as Pham approached a woman parked in her car about five miles 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.
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.” 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.
Other elected officials from Virginia condemned the violence, among them U.S. Sen. Mark Warner. He retweeted Connolly’s statement, calling the attack an “extraordinarily disturbing development.”