TW: Suicide
Former Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax and his wife, Cerina, a dentist, were found dead inside their Northern Virginia home early Thursday morning, in an apparent murder-suicide.
Fairfax County Police Chief Ken Davis said it appears that Justin Fairfax shot his wife before turning the gun on himself.
“It is high-profile in nature, it’s tragic in nature. Certainly, a fall from grace for a relatively high-profile family that seemingly had had a lot of things going in their favor,” Davis said.
Fairfax, a former federal prosecutor, was elected lieutenant governor in 2017 – the second African-American elected to statewide office in Virginia history – and he seemed, for a few days in 2019, to be in position to ascend to the governor’s job.
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This was in the wake of the scandal involving then-Gov. Ralph Northam, who was under intense pressure to resign after photos of Northam in blackface from his medical-school yearbook were made public.
Fairfax quickly got caught up in his own controversy – two allegations that he had raped acquaintances, one a fellow student at Duke University in 2000, the second a fellow Democrat at the party’s national convention in 2004.
Fairfax vigorously denied both allegations, but he also faced calls to resign from far and wide.
Both Fairfax and Northam rode out the controversies to finish out their terms, and Fairfax even mounted a bid for the Democratic Party gubernatorial nomination in the 2021 cycle, but he was clearly damaged goods politically at this point, and finished a distant fourth in a five-way primary, with 3.6 percent of the vote.
Fairfax returned to his private law practice after the June 2021 primary.
Resources
- The National Domestic Violence Hotline is available 24/7 at 1-800-799-7233.
- The Virginia Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Hotline is a free, confidential resource that is available 24/7. Virginians can chat online with a trained advocate, text an advocate at 804-793-9999, or speak on the phone with an advocate at 1-800-838-8238.
- For information about domestic violence shelters, sexual assault crisis centers, and advocacy programs across the Commonwealth of Virginia, click here.
- To find a local Virginia Department of Social Services agency, click here.
According to Davis, the Fairfax County Police Chief, Fairfax and his wife had been in the throes of “what seems to be a complicated or messy divorce.”
The couple had been married for 20 years, but Cerina Fairfax served her husband with divorce papers last summer; they were legally separated, but still living together amid the ongoing divorce proceedings, according to police, who, it was revealed today, responded to the family home in January after Justin Fairfax accused his wife of assaulting him.
Investigators later determined that Fairfax had lied about the assault after reviewing footage from cameras that his wife had set up inside the home.
“From what I understand in this early stage, former Lt. Gov. Fairfax was recently served some paperwork associated with an upcoming court proceeding that apparently led to this incident last night,” Davis said.
The couple’s teenage son and daughter were in the home at the time of the shooting, and it was the son who called 911 after hearing shots fired.
“So tragic for the children to lose both parents, extra tragic for them to actually be in the home when it occurred,” Davis said.
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Chris Graham
