MADISON, Wis. — A Wisconsin man was sentenced Wednesday to 7.5 years in prison after pleading guilty to bombing the office of an anti-abortion group two years ago.
Hridindu Roychowdhury, 29, of Madison, will also serve three years of supervised release under U.S. District Judge William Conley’s sentence and was ordered to pay nearly $32,000 in restitution.
Roychowdhury admitted to throwing two Molotov cocktails through the window of Wisconsin Family Action’s Madison office on May 8, 2022, less than a week after the leak of a draft opinion suggesting the U.S. Supreme Court’s intention to overturn Roe v. Wade decision from 1973 to overturn the legalization of abortion.
One of the incendiaries failed to ignite and the other set fire to a bookcase. Roychowdhury also acknowledged spray-painting the message “If abortions aren’t safe, then neither are you” on the outside of the building. There was no one in the office at the time.
Conley said Roychowdhury “engaged in a deliberate act of terror against a group that advocated a view different” from his own and had a “deep hatred and anger that justified in his mind the bombing of a building.”
A telephone message seeking comment from Roychowdhury’s federal public defender was left early Wednesday evening.
Investigators linked Roychowdhury to the firebombing after Capitol Police in Madison reviewed surveillance video of a protest against police brutality. Several people could be seen spray-painting graffiti on the Capitol grounds that resembled the message left at the Wisconsin Family Action office. The footage also showed two people leaving the area in a pickup truck that investigators followed to Roychowdhury’s home in Madison.
Police began tracking Roychowdhury and in March they recovered his DNA from a half-eaten burrito he had thrown away in a parking lot. This corresponds to a sample taken at the site of the firebombing.
Police arrested Roychowdhury on March 28, 1993, at a Boston airport where he had booked a one-way ticket to Guatemala City, federal prosecutors said.
Roychowdhury signed a plea deal with prosecutors in which he agreed to a federal charge of damaging property with explosives.