Justin Fairfax, a former lieutenant governor of Virginia, and his wife, Cerina Fairfax, were found dead in a murder-suicide at their home in Annandale, Virginia, shortly after midnight Thursday, according to county police.

The Fairfax County police chief said Justin Fairfax, 47, shot his wife and then himself. Their teenage children were home at the time, the police chief said.

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, were in court proceedings this year to divorce.

Fairfax was elected as Virginia’s lieutenant governor in 2017 and served alongside Gov. Ralph Northam in relative anonymity until the state was rocked by a series of political scandals in 2019 that briefly paralyzed the top levels of its government.

First, old medical school yearbook photos emerged that appeared to show Northam wearing blackface. Amid calls for Northam’s resignation, two women accused Fairfax, the governor’s potential successor, 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 was seeking to return to the office, of “treating me like Emmitt Till” for demanding that Fairfax resign in the wake of the sexual assault allegations.

With little institutional support and paltry fundraising, Fairfax came in fourth in the primary, taking 3.6% of the vote. McAuliffe won the Democratic nomination but went on to lose the general election to Glenn Youngkin, a Republican.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Jacey Fortin and Campbell Robertson/Parker Michels-Boyce
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