Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax at a ceremony in Richmond, in March 2019. Fairfax, who served out his term through 2022 after being accused of sexual assault, and his wife, Cerina Fairfax, were found dead in a murder-suicide at their home in Annandale, Va., today, according to the county police.
Justin Fairfax, a former lieutenant governor of Virginia, fatally shot his wife, Dr. Cerina Fairfax, and then killed himself at their home in Annandale, Virginia, shortly after midnight Thursday, according to county police.
Fairfax County Police Chief Kevin Davis said the couple's teenage children were home at the time, and that their son called 911 to report the shooting.
Fairfax, a Democrat, served as the lieutenant governor from 2018-22. He was accused of sexual assault by two women in 2019, prompting calls for his resignation. Fairfax denied the allegations and finished his term. He then ran unsuccessfully for governor, losing in the primary to former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe in 2021.
Kevin Davis, the county police chief, said the couple had been in an "ongoing domestic dispute surrounding a complicated or messy divorce." Court records show that Fairfax and his wife, a dentist, separated in 2024 but were living in the same house. Cerina Fairfax, 49, filed for divorce last summer.
Davis said that in January, Justin Fairfax, 47, called the police reporting that his wife had assaulted him. When police came to the house, they looked at footage from cameras that Cerina Fairfax had installed inside the home during the divorce proceedings.
"We corroborated that the alleged assault never occurred," Davis said Thursday.
Recently, Davis said, Justin Fairfax had been served with papers indicating his next court appearance.
He said that around midnight, 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," Davis said.
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 age 38, as Virginia's lieutenant governor in 2017.
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, Fairfax's father handed him a piece of paper, according to an interview that 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," 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 Northam's time in medical school emerged that appeared to show Northam wearing blackface. Calls erupted for Northam's resignation. Joe Biden said on social media that Northam "should resign immediately; Justin Fairfax is the leader Virginia needs now."
But within days, two women accused Fairfax of sexually assaulting them -- one in 2000 at Duke University and another in 2004 at the Democratic National Convention.
Fairfax denied the accusations, but they halted the momentum to push 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.
Insisting that he had done nothing wrong, Fairfax entered the 2021 Democratic primary race for governor. In one televised debate, he accused McAuliffe, who had called for Fairfax to resign, of treating him "like Emmett Till; no due process; immediately assumed my guilt."
With little institutional support and paltry fundraising, Fairfax came in fourth in the primary, with 3.6% of the vote. McAuliffe won the Democratic nomination but lost the general election to Glenn Youngkin, a Republican.
In recent years, Fairfax had been working as a lawyer in private practice.
On Thursday morning, Northam released a statement saying that he and his wife were "devastated by this heartbreaking news," and that they were praying for the Fairfax family.