A Missouri man who rammed a rented truck into a gate near the White House with aspirations of overthrowing the government was sentenced to eight years in prison Thursday, prosecutors said.
Sai Varshith Kandula, 20, of St. Louis, pleaded guilty in May to one count of willful injury or depredation of property of the U.S. in the May 22, 2023, incident. Prosecutors agreed to seek only an eight-year sentence.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for Washington said his goal was “to overthrow the democratically elected government of the United States in order to replace it with a dictatorship fueled by Nazi ideology.”
“It was less a ‘plan’ than an assemblage of delusional thoughts stitched together by a common thread,” Kandula’s attorney wrote in a sentencing memorandum. After he was arrested, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, the attorney wrote.
Kandula, an Indian national who was a lawful permanent U.S. resident with a green card at the time, crashed a U-Haul truck into the gate at the intersection of H Street Northwest and 16th Street Northwest around 9:35 p.m., the prosecutor’s office said.
The truck became disabled, and Kandula got out and pulled a flag with a Nazi swastika on it from his backpack before he was arrested, it said.
No one was injured in the incident.
Prosecutors wrote in their own memorandum that Kandula nearly struck two pedestrians, and that an eight-year sentence was warranted because of the seriousness of his actions and for deterrence purposes.
Kandula’s attorney wrote in the sentencing memo that he will likely be deported due to the conviction, and will return to India to live with family.
