Virginia Ex-Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax Kills Wife and Self, Police Say

Mr. Fairfax, a Democrat, served as lieutenant governor from 2018 to 2022. The couple's children were home at the time, the police said, and their son called 911. 

Justin Fairfax, a former lieutenant governor of Virginia, fatally shot his wife, Cerina Fairfax, and then killed himself at their home in Annandale, Va., shortly after midnight on Thursday, according to the county police.

The Fairfax County police chief, Kevin Davis, said that the couple's teenage children were home at the time, and that their son called 911 to report the shooting.

Mr. Fairfax, a Democrat, served as the lieutenant governor from 2018 to 2022. He was accused of sexual assault by two women in 2019, prompting calls for his resignation. Mr. Fairfax denied the allegations and finished his term. He then ran unsuccessfully for governor, losing in the primary to the former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe in 2021.

Kevin Davis, the county police chief, said that the couple had been in an "ongoing domestic dispute surrounding a complicated or messy divorce." Court records show that Mr. Fairfax and his wife, a dentist, separated in 2024 but were living in the same house. Dr. Fairfax, 49, filed for divorce last summer.

Chief Davis said that in January, Mr. Fairfax, 47, called the police reporting that his wife had assaulted him. When the police came to the house, they looked at footage from cameras that Dr. Fairfax had installed inside the home during the divorce proceedings.

"We corroborated that the alleged assault never occurred," the police chief said on Thursday.

Recently, the chief said, Mr. Fairfax had been served with papers indicating his next court appearance.

He said that around midnight, Mr. Fairfax shot his wife in the house's unfinished basement and then went upstairs to his bedroom where he shot himself.

"It's tragic in nature," Chief Davis said.

Mr. Fairfax, a graduate of Duke University and Columbia Law School, was a rising star in Virginia politics. He was seen as a potential national figure by friends and associates even before he was elected, at the age of 38, as Virginia's lieutenant governor in 2017.

Mr. Fairfax and his family seemed acutely aware of the historical significance of a Black man being elected statewide in Virginia for only the second time in the history of the commonwealth, once the capital of the Confederacy. Just before taking office in 2018, Mr. Fairfax's father handed him a piece of paper, according to an interview that Mr. Fairfax gave a local news outlet around that time.

"It was the manumission papers for my three-greats-ago grandfather Simon Fairfax in 1798, and he was freed by the Ninth Lord Fairfax," Mr. Fairfax said. "And so, as I raised my right hand to take the oath of office as lieutenant governor of Virginia, I had in my breast pocket the papers that freed my three-greats-ago grandfather."

He served with a relatively low profile alongside Gov. Ralph Northam until the state was rocked by a series of political scandals in 2019 that briefly paralyzed the top levels of its government.

First, yearbook photos from Mr. Northam's time in medical school emerged that appeared to show Mr. Northam wearing blackface. Calls erupted for Mr. Northam's resignation. Joseph R. Biden Jr. said on social media that Mr. Northam "should resign immediately, Justin Fairfax is the leader Virginia needs now."

But within days, two women accused Mr. Fairfax of sexually assaulting them — one in 2000 at Duke University and another in 2004 at the Democratic National Convention.

Mr. Fairfax denied the accusations, but they halted the momentum to push Mr. Northam from office. Adding to the furor, the state attorney general, the third-ranking Virginia Democrat at the time, acknowledged that he had also worn blackface in college. In the end, all three completed their terms in office.

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