A man with a metal baseball bat walked into the northern Virginia office of U.S. Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-V.A., on Monday, asked for him, then attacked two of his staffers with the bat, including an intern on her first day on the job, police and the congressman said.
“This morning, an individual entered my District Office armed with a baseball bat and asked for me before committing an act of violence against two members of my staff,” Connolly said in a statement to the media. “The individual is in police custody and both members of my team were transferred to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.”
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Connolly said the two women attacked — an intern struck in the side and an outreach director hit on the head — were treated and released from a hospital.
The veteran Democratic congressman, who wasn’t in the office at the time, said in an interview that the suspect was known to police in Fairfax County, adding, “he’s never made threats to us so it was unprovoked, unexpected and inexplicable.”
The attack marked the latest in an uptick in violence aimed at lawmakers or those close to them. The U.S. Capitol Police investigated around 7,500 cases of potential threats against members of Congress in 2022. The year before, they investigated around 10,000 threats to members, more than twice the number from four years earlier.
Connolly hesitated to label the attack as politically motivated.
“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,” he said.
The suspect’s father told The Washington Post his son was schizophrenic and had dealt with mental illness since his late teens, and he also said that he had unsuccessfully tried to arrange mental health care for his son.
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The U.S. Capitol Police and Fairfax City Police identified the suspect, a 49-year-old man form Fairfax. Police are holding him 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.
“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.
Fairfax County Police said a man later identified as the suspect 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. The woman wasn’t injured.
NBC News obtained a video of the suspect chasing a different person with a bat mere minutes before the attack on Connolly’s office.
A video recorded on a neighbor’s home camera system showed a man chasing a woman with a bat at the site where police said the earlier incident occurred. The woman can be heard screaming and a man is shown chasing her up a small hill before giving up and turning around. Dan Ashley, the homeowner, said it was “troubling to see this sort of thing happening in the neighborhood.”
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NEW: Neighbor tell @jackiebensen his doorbell camera captured suspect in bat attack at @GerryConnolly office chasing a woman with a bat minutes earlier. Fairfax County Police confirm charges pending @nbcwashington pic.twitter.com/824OvypDKv
— Tom Lynch (@TomLynch_) May 15, 2023
In May 2022, a person whose name and community of residence match the suspect’s 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.”
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. The suspect assaulted responding officers and attempted to take a firearm, according to the statement, adding the officers sustained minor injuries.
He was taken into custody and charged with assault on a law enforcement officer, resisting arrest and attempting to disarm a law enforcement officer. Those charges were eventually dropped.
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A person with the Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office, who spoke to the media on condition of anonymity because the suspect now has an ongoing criminal case, said the charges were dropped because they stemmed from a mental health crisis and that the defendant entered an agreement designed to ensure he received mental health treatment. The person 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.
Fairfax City Police spokesperson Sgt. Lisa Gardner said police received a call about the attack at Connolly’s Virginia office at about 10:50 a.m. Monday. Police arrived in about five minutes and located the suspect in the office and detained him, Gardner said. One police officer received a minor injury and was treated.
Connolly, a Democrat currently serving his eighth term in Congress, represents Virginia’s Fairfax County-based 11th District in the Washington suburbs. He said windows were broken at the office during the incident.
“I have the best team in Congress,” Connolly said in a statement. “My District Office staff make themselves available to constituents and members of the public every day. The thought that someone would take advantage of my staff’s accessibility to commit an act of violence is unconscionable and devastating.”
In Virginia, other elected officials from both parties have condemned the violence.
U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., retweeted Connolly’s statement, calling the attack an “extraordinarily disturbing development.”
“Intimidation and violence – especially against public servants – has no place in our society,” he said.
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Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, issued his own statement.
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Violence does not belong in our political system and my prayers are with Rep. Gerry Connolly’s staff for a speedy recovery. We’ve seen this against our judiciary, we’ve seen this against our legislative branch and it has no place in our Commonwealth.
— Governor Glenn Youngkin (@GovernorVA) May 15, 2023
The Horn editorial team and the Associated Press contributed to this article.