by Robert Hill
The horrifying news of the April 16, 2026, murder-suicide of Fairfax County, Virginia’s African American power couple Justin Fairfax and Cerina Fairfax, at his hand, jarred the nation. In the Western Pennsylvania region, special attention might be particularly manifest because Justin Fairfax was born in Pittsburgh.
An odd Virginia law allowed the pair to be legally separated while residing under the same roof—independent of one another—as divorce proceedings ensued. There, one of their teen children discovered the tragedy of their deaths and called 911. Deceased Cerina was a practicing dentist wife, and deceased Justin was an A-list attorney husband, who had been the most popular Black Virginia public official since Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder in the early 1990s. Justin Fairfax had been lieutenant governor of Virginia from 2018 to 2022.
ROBERT HILL
Born in 1979, when he was three-years-old Justin Fairfax moved with his family to Washington, D. C. He attended and graduated from Duke University in 2000. As a member of its law review, he graduated from Columbia Law School in 2005.
A member of a mightily accomplished family, Justin Fairfax’s oldest brother, Roger Fairfax Jr. is a Harvard College and Harvard Law School graduate, a legal scholar and dean of Howard University School of Law (alma mater of former Virginia governor and lieutenant governor Douglas Wilder and Thurgood Marshall, and where Patricia Roberts Harris served as dean.) The brothers’ father, Roger Fairfax Sr., is a Harvard graduate.
The name Fairfax has a storied pedigree. The city of Fairfax, Virginia and Fairfax County, Virginia are namesakes of the Caucasian British aristocrat Thomas Fairfax. Slaveholder Fairfax, a baron of Cameron and mentor of younger enslaver George Washington, found religion. As a result, Baron Fairfax freed Fairfax slaves in 18th and 19th centuries Virginia. On June 5, 1798, he manumitted African American slave Simon Fairfax, great-great-great grandfather of former Virginia lieutenant governor, Justin Fairfax.
Prior to becoming Virginia’s second highest official, Justin Fairfax held a series of legal and political positions of high visibility. And he joined the law firm of Morrison & Foerster. It all came crashing down while he was 41st Virginia lieutenant governor and a partner at his law firm. Sexual assault allegations derailed his previously scandal-free trajectory in 2019 as two women—Vanessa Tyson and Meredith Watson—accused him. He served out his term of public office but resigned from the law firm in 2019.
Long before Justin Fairfax was born, Pittsburgh’s West End was the home of family member Sam Fairfax, a World War I army hero with the 351st Artillery Regiment, a Black segregated and mostly Pittsburgh unit of the United States Army, that fought Germany to secure Caucasian liberty in Europe.
Roger Fairfax Sr., was a vice president of the Pittsburgh Urban League and a radio executive at the Black Pittsburgh radio station WAMO, which was operated by Sheridan Broadcasting’s African American president, Glenn Mahone, now a renowned Pittsburgh attorney. The Black media company was owned by famed Pittsburgh dentist Judith Davenport and prominent attorney Ronald Davenport Sr., a former dean of the law school at Duquesne University.
Surrounded by African American overachievers—historically, professionally and personally—Justin Fairfax was destined for continuing eminence until fate intervened. The fall from grace and the macabre murder-suicide news amount to a ‘’Shakespearian tragedy,” observed Glenn Mahone.
(Robert Hill is an award-winning Pittsburgh writer and communications consultant.)
