Man who stabbed family members to death killed by police

A Fairfax County police officer shot and killed a suspect on Feb. 23 in the Mantua area who was in the process of stabbing members of his own family with a dagger.

The man’s daughter and wife died from their injuries, and his son-in-law is in the hospital in a life-threatening condition, said Police Chief Kevin Davis at a media briefing on the scene this morning. A 1-year-old baby in the home was unharmed.  

The son-in-law was in the parking lot cleaning the snow off his car when he heard a disturbance coming from his garden-style apartment at Margate Manor in the 3900 block of Persimmon Circle in Fairfax.

Both the son-in-law and a neighbor called 911. When the son-in-law went into the apartment, “he was confronted with a bloodbath of a scene with his father-in-law butchering his family,” Davis said.

His father-in-law had already stabbed his wife and daughter with a knife that Davis described as “a curved dagger with a 10-inch blade that resembles a meat cleaver.” He then turned the dagger on his son-in-law and was in the process of stabbing him when two young police officers arrived.

“To describe this scene as bloody is an understatement,” Davis said. “The damage and chaos and the carnage that was perpetrated by this man in his 50s on his own family is unimaginable.”

The officer who entered first gave repeated commands to the perpetrator to drop the knife.

“Not only does he not drop the knife, but he still proceeds to stab the son-in-law,” Davis said. So the officer discharged his firearm and killed “the knife-wielding man who had just killed his own daughter and had just stabbed, brutally, his own wife and his own son-in-law.”

“The officer did exactly what we expect him to do and quite frankly what our community expects him to do,” Davis said, lauding his “grace under pressure, his bravery, and his effort to save lives.”  

The son-in-law and his wife, both in their 30s, their baby, and the wife’s parents all lived in the apartment. There had been no previous calls for service for domestic violence or anything else at that residence, Davis said. The father-in-law doesn’t appear to have a criminal history, although the investigation is in the early stages.

The police aren’t identifying the victims until the next of kin can be notified. “The only one who is alive and conscious is the baby,” Davis said. The baby is being taken care of by Victim Services and Child Protective Services.

“The turmoil that man was going through that would somehow compel him to stab in a really brutal way his own family members like that,” he said, “I can’t wrap my head around it.”