(CNN) Virginia Democratic Rep. Gerry Connolly said two staff members were injured Monday by a bat-wielding man who came to his Fairfax district office.
Connolly told CNN that the assailant who entered his office and attacked two of his assistants did so with a metal bat. The attacker hit a senior aide on the head with a metal bat, he said. The attacker also hit an intern — on his first day on the job — in the side with a bat.
In a statement early Monday, Connolly said the two assistants were taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, and the City of Fairfax Police Department arrested the man.
The suspect, identified by the US Capitol Police as Xuan Kha Tran Pham, 49-years-old of Fairfax, is facing charges of one count of aggravated malicious injury and one count of malicious injury, USCP said.
“At this time, it was not clear what the suspect’s motivation may have been,” said the USCP in their statement. “Based on what we know now, investigators have no information that the suspect is known to the USCP.”
Pham suffers from schizophrenia, his father said in an interview with CNN, and was previously accused of assaulting a law enforcement officer before the charge was later dropped, records show.
The attacker, who was a constituent from his district but Connolly said he did not know, caused extensive damage to his office, breaking glass in a conference room and smashing computers in the street. “He was filled with uncontrollable rage,” Connolly told CNN in a phone interview.
Connolly said Monday that the person had contacted his office in the past.
“He contacted our office, asked for help with something, and my staff helped him,” Connolly told CNN. “But there’s no indication right now that the two are having a relationship at all. And my staff understands from talking to him that he’s making strange statements. Nothing threatening, though.”
The Virginia Democrat said he didn’t “think there was a motive” for the incident, adding: “I think we’re talking about real mental illness.”
Connolly said he was at a ribbon cutting at the time for a food bank when the assailant drove to his office and entered the building. The congressman estimated that it will take five minutes for the police to respond to an emergency call for help.
Neighbors identified Pham as a man who was caught on a home security camera Monday morning wielding a bat and chasing a woman in his neighborhood.
Security video, provided to CNN by a homeowner who lives near the suspect, shows a woman screaming as she runs away from the man with the bat. The recording is timestamped as having taken place at 10:34 am, just before the attack on the congressional office.
A law enforcement source confirmed that prior to the attack on the congressman’s office, the suspect confronted a woman in Fairfax County. He smashed his car with a baseball bat, the source said.
Pham’s father, Hy Xuan Pham, told CNN that his son is schizophrenic and has not taken his medication for three months. He said he last saw him Monday morning, and later heard from the police that he had been arrested.
“He is in serious condition,” the father said in an interview. “All day and all night, he was muttering … he was talking and it was as if he was talking to someone in his brain, and suddenly, he was screaming in anger.”
The father of the suspect said that he tried to get his son treated but he couldn’t take it anymore.
Virginia court records show Pham was previously charged in January 2022 in Fairfax with felony assault on a law enforcement officer, several counts of attempting to disarm a stun gun at a law enforcement officer, and obstruction of justice or resisting arrest. The disposition of the case is listed as “nolle prosequi,” which usually means that the district attorney declined to prosecute it. No further details about the case were immediately available Monday afternoon.
Last year, a man with the same name and hometown as Pham filed a federal lawsuit against the CIA, alleging in a brief handwritten complaint that the agency is guilty of “wrongfully imprisoning me in a low vision based on physics called the book of the world since 1975,” and “cruelly torturing me with worsening disability continuously since 1988 until now from the fourth dimension.”
The CIA moved to dismiss the lawsuit, which Pham filed without a lawyer, earlier this year, calling her claims “facially implausible.” The motion is pending.
Monday’s attack comes amid a series of incidents in which members of Congress, their staff and their families have been attacked in recent months.
In March, a staff member of Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky was stabbed in Washington, DC. In February, a man attacked Democratic Rep. Angie Craig of Minnesota in the elevator of her apartment building also in Washington. In October, a man attacked Paul Pelosi, the husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who landed him in the hospital after hitting Paul Pelosi with a hammer at the couple’s San Francisco home.
Connolly said on Monday that there should be more security funds for the offices of members in their districts.
“I think we need to re-evaluate the security we provide or not provide district offices,” Connolly said. “So if you’re a member of Congress and your office is in a federal building, in a courthouse, you have security. None. And what happens to that? Well, we learned the answer to that this morning.”
This story has been updated with additional developments.
CNN’s Casey Tolan, Blake Ellis, John Miller, Scott Bronstein, Allison Gordon and Kristin Wilson contributed to this report.