Violent Anarchist arrested for the "Jane's Revenge" firebombing of a pro-life group's office. - Hridindu Roychowdhury
The attack was the first Jane's Revenge and most high profile attack that inspired dozens of other attacks. Hridindu Roychowdhury was Wisconsin arrested and federally charged with arson.
On May 2nd 2022 Politico reported on a the leaked Dobbs decision. The Dobbs decision would eventually overturn Roe v Wade, the abortion ruling that has been fought over by pro-life and pro-abortion groups for decades. Protests quickly erupted across the country, some of them turning criminal and violent. In addition to these protests, a nation-wide campaign of targeted attacks begun from more extreme anarchist associated with Antifa groups. These attacks included firebombings, graffiti, and smashing out windows. AntifaWatch has documented many of these attacks on our tracker.
The highest profile attack and one of the first firebombings took place in Wisconsin on May 7th. Images of the arson damage and the graffiti quickly surfaced online. Extremist podcaster Robert Evans received and published a message claiming responsibility for the attack and promising more attacks. The message identified the group as Jane's Revenge.
This message rapidly spread on social media, and other attacks took place with the same graffiti also claiming to be Jane's Revenge. Despite the large number of attacks, very few arrests were made. Only two others were arrested by January 2023, they were Antifa members from Florida, Caleb Freestone and Amber Smith-Stewart who were arrested for their alleged Jane's Revenge vandalism.
On March 28th 2023 Hridindu Sankar Roychowdhury was arrested in the Boston airport by federal authorities for his alleged part in the Madison attack. Roychowdhury is a Protein Engineer and Computational Biologist who received his PhD from University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The criminal complaint against Roychowdhury shows how police found him. Following the attack the ATF collected a glass container with an attached fabric cloth for DNA analysis, on the cloth they found DNA profiles from three different individuals. While federal authorities had DNA, they found no matches within the national database called CODIS.
The investigation appears to have gone cold for some time after that, until in January of 2023, following the death of Antifa gunman Manuel "Tortuguita" Teran in Atlanta a protest was held in support in Madison Wisconsin. The protest was held on January 21st at the state capitol where Wisconsin State Capitol Police were watching. During the demonstration they noticed multiple individuals spray painting graffiti. This graffiti had a unique cursive style, that is somewhat uncommon to more block letter graffiti styles. Law enforcement noted a potential connection to the firebombing attack and began making an effort to identify the vandals.
Law enforcement went through CCTV cameras to find a white Toyota pickup that had entered around the time. They linked this truck with Roychowdhury and began surveillance. On March 1st they saw Roychowdhury throw away a bag and retrieved it. In the bag they found an unfinished burrito. This bag was submitted for DNA analysis and found a match with the molotov glass.
Limited other information was released, however our exclusive robust social media research was able to build a more detailed profile on Roychowdhury's extremist background despite his Twitter account being locked.
First we looked at follower data to get an idea of where he got his information and who he may have associated with ideologically. In this we found a huge number of violent extremist groups such as crimethinc, PNWYLF, Puget Sound JBGC, It's Going Down News, Filler PGH, submedia, SRA, Defend the ATL Forest, and many more.
Following this we ran our DeletedTweets project on the account. While we don't know if he deleted the tweets, because the account is locked all archived tweets are treated as deleted, that report can be found here.
While some of the tweets were about his PhD work and coworkers, many expressed a violent anarchist ideology. This extremism dates back to atleast 2019, where he expressed an interest in joining the YPG like violent extremist Dan Baker who is currently in federal prison for his threats. Roychowdhury also interacted with other violent extremists such Antifa nail bomber Richard T. Hunsinger, DNA analysis was also used to identify Hunsinger.
This further shown in a January 2021 tweet where Roychowdhury angirly attacked Antifa international for trying to claim that the 2020 riots were not a coup against the state, asking why they even have a black (anarchist) flag if they're going to go about peace policing and playing down the violence against the state and other targets that took place during the 2020 riots.
As there were 3 individual's DNA found on the molotov, Roychowdhury may be the first of several to be arrested from this attack. Left wing extremists may associate themselves with a variety of different names such as Jane's Revenge, 'StopCopCity' and Antifa the underlying violent ideology remains the same. AntifaWatch will provide updates to the court cases on our social media, and if there are any large updates on this website.
