“Justin Fairfax is the leader Virginia needs now,” Joe Biden posted on X in February 2019.

Clearly, neither Biden nor any other human on this planet had any clue in 2019 that we’d now be reporting the horrifically sad story of how Fairfax murdered his wife, Cerina, and then killed himself while his teenage children were at home, yet there were also clues in 2019 that Fairfax was not, in fact, the leader anyone needed.

Fairfax served as Virginia’s lieutenant governor from 2018 to 2022, and he was expected to replace (or at least succeed) the scandal-plagued Ralph Northam in 2019. But Northam didn’t resign, and Fairfax quickly faced his own headwinds.

Our Mark Alexander wrote at the time about Northam’s blackface and KKK robe scandal. Unfortunately for Fairfax, allegations of sexual assault from multiple women derailed his political aspirations, and after a failed bid for governor in 2022, he faded into the private sector.

That doesn’t mean he didn’t have his defenders along the way.

“Virginia’s 2017 statewide elections were the first after Donald Trump’s 2016 election,” Alexander said in 2019, “and [The Washington Post] had the scandalous details about sexual assault allegations against Northam’s Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, but chose not to make those charges public.” That was in the wake of the #MeToo kerfuffle, and Democrats and the Leftmedia were loath to undermine their complaints against Donald Trump by taking out yet another abusive man of the Left.

Nevertheless, they couldn’t or wouldn’t fully circle the wagons, so Fairfax kept a public enemies list.

Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger, then a member of Congress, said Fairfax had shown “exceptionally poor judgment in his handling of these allegations” by slandering his accuser with “vile and degrading language.” She called for his resignation.

Spanberger did not, however, display much concern when it was revealed that Virginia’s current attorney general, Jay Jones, used violent rhetoric to wish death upon his political opponents.

What the heck is going on in Virginia?

Early Thursday, Fairfax shot his wife to death before turning the gun on himself amidst what Fairfax County Police Chief Kevin Davis called “an ongoing domestic dispute surrounding what seems to be a complicated or messy divorce.” Those prior allegations were at the center of the divorce. Earlier this year, Fairfax called the police to report his wife for assault, but there was no evidence of it on the cameras Cerina had set up in their home.

Davis added, “From what I understand in this early stage, former lieutenant governor Fairfax was recently served some paperwork associated with an upcoming court proceeding that apparently led to this incident last night.”

A family friend indicated that the recent career-ending debacle Eric Swalwell brought upon himself triggered bad memories for Justin Fairfax.

Domestic violence is a scourge across our country. I can tell you from my recent experience on our local grand jury that numerous cases involve repeat offenders. The police were often “well acquainted” with the alleged perpetrator(s). Broken homes have terrible ripple effects throughout our society that, frankly, stem from and lead to horrible public policy.

In Fairfax’s case, the judge overseeing his divorce recently wrote that his “isolation, drinking, and a lack of participation in family life are manifestations of what seems to be a sense of fatalism and hopelessness.” The Fairfaxes were still living together despite a legal separation en route to divorce, but the judge had ordered Justin to move out by the end of April because “it is clear tensions in the Fairfax home have been extremely high for an extended period of time.”

He had manifested a severe drinking problem since 2019, yet he bought a handgun in 2022.

“Gun violence is a national health crisis emergency, and we need to start acting like it!” Fairfax posted on Facebook in 2023. “We need a #HeadHandHeart approach that addresses mental health, unfettered access to weapons of mass killing & the internal damage that prompts people to destroy others.”

Notably, Fairfax cast the tiebreaking vote to pass Virginia’s first red flag law in 2020. Such laws enable authorities to temporarily take guns or other weapons from an individual they believe poses a threat. Those laws certainly sound appealing — who wants a dangerous person to possess a firearm? Yet the catch is that due process is often denied, and people are deprived of their constitutional rights before a crime has even been committed. And it’s sometimes based on the vindictiveness of domestic disputes rather than solid evidence of criminal behavior or even tendencies.

Should Fairfax himself have been subject to disarmament under that law? What about AG Jones?

In the meantime, my heart goes out to the Fairfaxes’ two high school children, one of whom called 9-1-1 to report this crime. I hope and pray God grants them peace after such brokenness and loss.

Follow Nate Jackson on X.