MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A Wisconsin man was sentenced Wednesday to 7½ years in jail after pleading responsible to firebombing the workplace of an anti-abortion group two years in the past.
Hridindu Roychowdhury, 29, of Madison, additionally will serve three years on supervised launch underneath the sentence handed down by U.S. District Choose William Conley and was ordered to pay practically $32,000 in restitution.
Roychowdhury admitted to throwing two Molotov cocktails via the window of the Madison workplace of Wisconsin Household Motion on Could 8, 2022, lower than every week after the leak of a draft opinion suggesting the U.S. Supreme Courtroom’s intention to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade determination legalizing abortion.
One of many firebombs did not ignite, and the opposite set a bookcase on hearth. Roychowdhury additionally acknowledged spray-painting the message “If abortions aren’t protected you then aren’t both” on the surface of the constructing. Nobody was within the workplace on the time.
Conley mentioned Roychowdhury “engaged in a deliberate act of terrorism towards a bunch advocating a special view” from his personal and had a “deep hate and anger that in his thoughts justified firebombing a constructing.”
A phone message in search of remark was left early Wednesday night with Roychowdhury’s federal public defender.
Investigators related Roychowdhury to the firebombing after police assigned to the state Capitol in Madison reviewed surveillance video of a protest in opposition to police brutality. It confirmed a number of individuals spray-painting graffiti on Capitol grounds that resembled the message left on the Wisconsin Household Motion workplace. The photographs additionally confirmed two individuals leaving the realm in a pickup that investigators tracked to Roychowdhury’s residence in Madison.
Police started following Roychowdhury, and in March they extracted his DNA from a half-eaten burrito he threw away at a car parking zone. That matched a pattern taken on the scene of the firebombing.
Police arrested Roychowdhury on March 28, 1993, at a Boston airport the place he had booked a one-way ticket to Guatemala Metropolis, federal prosecutors have mentioned.
Roychowdhury signed a plea take care of prosecutors agreeing to a federal cost of damaging property with explosives.
