Justin Fairfax, a former lieutenant governor of Virginia shot and killed his wife Cerina Fairfax before suicide.
According to The Guardian, Fairfax whose tenure was upended by allegations of sexual assault, shot himself and wife on Thursday, April 16.
Kevin Davis, the chief of the Fairfax county police department in Virginia, said at a press conference that the murder-suicide took place in the context of “an ongoing domestic dispute surrounding what seems to be a complicated or messy divorce”.
The shooting took place at the Fairfaxes residence in Annandale, Virginia, and police arrived on the scene after receiving a 911 call from one of their teenage children shortly after midnight.
“Former lieutenant governor Justin Fairfax shot and killed his wife inside of their home and then shot and killed himself,” Davis added.
A Democratic lieutenant governor who served from 2018 to 2022 under Governor Ralph Northam, Justin Fairfax, 47, was the second African American to hold statewide office in Virginia since Reconstruction and considered a rising star in the state’s politics.
His career was upended in 2019, when two women accused him of sexual assault and he faced a barrage of calls to resign amid a wider misconduct scandal that engulfed Northam’s administration.
Davis said that Cerina and Justin Fairfax were living together as they went through their divorce, and that the former lieutenant governor “was recently served some paperwork associated with an upcoming court proceeding that apparently led to this incident last night”.
Their two teenage children were in the house at the time of the killings.
