Judge Amit P. Mehta said the suspect, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, is hospitalized and in “dire circumstances.”
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The man accused of shooting two National Guard troops in D.C. last fall, killing one of them, has been refusing food and sometimes water and was admitted to the hospital, a federal judge said at an emergency court hearing Thursday.
Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national, is charged with fatally shooting Spec. Sarah Beckstrom, 20, and with attempting to kill Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, then 24, in late November. Wolfe was shot in the head, and his doctor has said he has made “extraordinary progress” in his recovery.
Prosecutors in U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office allege that Lakanwal carried out the ambush-style attack after driving across the country from his home in Washington state, studying a National Guard contingent that was on patrol several blocks from the White House before opening fire with a .357-caliber revolver.
A grand jury indicted Lakanwal on 17 counts, and Justice Department officials are weighing whether to seek the death penalty if he is convicted. Lakanwal was shot by a National Guard supervisor during the attack, prosecutors said, and was detained in the D.C. jail after recovering from his injuries.
At an emergency hearing Thursday, U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta said Lakanwal was admitted this week to George Washington University Hospital after his health took a turn for the worse.
“As I understand it, Mr. Lakanwal’s health has deteriorated quite substantially and he is in dire circumstances,” Mehta said, adding that his condition was “in some sense self-inflicted” because he had been “refusing food and, in some cases, water.”
An assistant U.S. attorney, Jocelyn Ballantine, said the government needed access to Lakanwal’s medical records to make requests and recommendations to the court on how to address Lakanwal’s health during his pretrial detention.
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Ballantine said that the U.S. Marshals Service advised prosecutors two weeks ago that there was a “significant problem” with Lakanwal, but that the U.S. attorney’s office could not access his medical records without first getting the judge’s permission.
A federal public defender for Lakanwal, Michelle Peterson, voiced concern that the government could use Lakanwal’s protected medical history to get a window into his potential defenses at trial, but Peterson ultimately agreed with a request to release limited medical records from this week.
Peterson and a spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment after the hearing.
Beckstrom and Wolfe, both members of the West Virginia National Guard, were among more than 2,000 Guard members deployed to D.C. after President Donald Trump’s announcement of a “crime emergency” in the city last August. After the November attack, Trump ordered an additional 500 troops to the capital.
Lakanwal had previously worked with the U.S. government as a partner in Afghanistan, serving in the CIA’s “Zero Units” that seized or killed suspected terrorists before he was resettled with his family in Bellingham, Washington.
A Washington Post investigation found that Lakanwal slipped deeper into isolation as he struggled to adapt with his wife and five children in the United States.
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Perry Stein contributed to this report.
