It has been nearly 10 months since a man attacked Maryam Khan, the first Muslim elected to the Connecticut House of Representatives, outside an Eid al-Adha prayer service in Hartford, Conn. She is still struggling to heal, she said.
“I have a lot of things to get through, both emotionally and physically,” Ms. Khan said. “I’m still working on trying to heal and process what happened.”
But she felt some closure in a courtroom on Tuesday, she said, when she watched her attacker plead guilty to felony charges related to the attack.
The man, Andrey Desmond, 30, of New Britain, Conn., pleaded guilty to attempted third-degree sexual assault, strangulation and risk of injury to a child, according to the clerk’s office at the State Superior Court in Hartford.
“He claimed to understand what was happening, and for me, personally, it was helpful to be there and to witness that,” Ms. Khan said.
Under the terms of a plea agreement, Mr. Desmond is required to serve five years in prison, register as a sex offender and receive mental health treatment after he is released. His sentencing is scheduled for June 4.
The attack occurred on June 28, after a morning prayer service hosted by the Islamic Center of Connecticut and held at the XL Center, an arena and conference center. Ms. Khan was taking pictures with her family, including her three children, outside the arena when Mr. Desmond approached and made numerous suggestive and threatening comments, she said.
When Ms. Khan tried to walk away, Mr. Desmond put his arm around her neck, tried to kiss her, slapped her across the face and threw her to the ground, the police said in June.
Ms. Khan thought she was going to die during the attack, she said on Wednesday.
After the attack, Mr. Desmond tried to run away but was chased down by bystanders and held until the police arrived and arrested him.
Some Muslim groups and state lawmakers, including Ms. Khan, initially called for Mr. Desmond to be charged with a hate crime, but after an investigation hate crime charges were not added.
Ms. Khan said she still wondered why Mr. Desmond targeted her and her family.
“I don’t think it was totally random,” she said. “I think there was something about us, I don’t know what, that made him think it was easy to accomplish what he wanted to with us.”
Mr. Desmond had been diagnosed with schizophrenia before the attack and has a long history of psychiatric hospitalizations and time in inpatient facilities in New York and Connecticut. He was released from prison in 2020 and placed under intensive monitoring under Kendra’s Law, New York’s court-ordered outpatient treatment program for people with severe mental illness who are most at risk of committing acts of violence.
By the spring of 2023, it was clear that the nonprofit contractor assigned to coordinate the man’s care was not responding promptly to signs that he was unraveling. Just weeks before the attack, in conversations with a reporter as part of a New York Times investigation into the Kendra’s Law program, Mr. Desmond described delusions, saying he sometimes thought that people were “raping” him in his sleep. “They think things are going to turn out well? If this country puts me out on the street?” he asked.
Mr. Desmond left his housing program in the Bronx that May and returned to Connecticut, where he grew up. For weeks, his mother tried to reach a member of the team coordinating his care, calling and texting frantically to ask the worker to find her son. Days after her last text went unanswered, he attacked Ms. Khan.
Aaron Romano, Ms. Khan’s lawyer, called the situation “a confluence of tragedy.” He said Mr. Desmond was exhibiting signs of severe mental illness at the time of the attack, but that a court-ordered evaluation determined Mr. Desmond was competent to stand trial.
The violent episode “highlights just how broken our mental health system is and how the brokenness of that system turns other people in society, like me and my children, into victims,” Ms. Khan said. She said that she was exploring the issue of mental health treatment in Connecticut as she looked toward the next legislative session.
Ms. Khan said Mr. Desmond had left her and her children with “a lifetime trauma.”
“I think this is going to be something that sticks with them for a long time,” she said of her children, who were 10, 12 and 15 at the time of the attack. “Even when we go out in public and they hear a man yelling, my children immediately have panic attacks. They can’t sit in spaces where people are yelling.”
Still, she said, her feelings toward Mr. Desmond are complicated. He is the product of a “revolving door system” that “puts people back on the street even though they don’t know how to take care of themselves yet,” she said.
“If he had received proper care, we may not have been here,” she said.
Jan Ransom contributed reporting.
