My Family Survived a “Murder-Suicide.” Stop Rewriting Justin Fairfax’s Violence as “Mental Health.”

There are two images sitting side by side in my family’s archival records. They are not framed or honored. They sit in a brown accordion folder, yellowed and turned in on themselves, like something no one quite knows what to do with but can’t bring themselves to throw away.

That would be me.

On the left is my grandmother, Katherine Hammond. My biological mother’s mom. (I am adopted. My mother Robin died by suicide when I was five. I have no memory of her.)

In this November 1971 photo, my grandmother is young, composed, and beautiful in that quiet, unforced way that doesn’t need explanation. Her hair is carefully styled, her gaze is steady, and her mouth is set in something between a smile and restraint. There is a softness to her face.

She looks like someone fully alive inside her own life. Someone who had plans. Someone who moved through the world with intention. She was a model for Jet and Say magazines back in the 1950s. I found a news clipping about her being arrested in Harlem for peddling illegal liquor. The reporter who wrote about her arrest and court appearance commented on her “beautiful gams.” Gams is old slang for well-formed legs.

There is no hint, in that photograph, of what would be done to her.

On the right is the man who killed her, Kenneth Hammond. He was an insurance underwriter from Hackensack, New Jersey. I don’t know anything else about him other than he married my grandmother two years after my grandfather’s death.

His image is grainier. It’s a newspaper reproduction that looks flattened and stripped of depth. He is turned slightly, eyes not quite meeting the camera. It’s the kind of photo that maybe came from a yearbook or some staff directory. It’s a life that, at a glance, reads as quite ordinary.

And beneath his face, there’s the headline from The Bergen Record. It’s Bold. Centered. Certain: Couple Dies In Murder And Suicide.

I have looked at these images for years, and I still cannot get past that word. Couple. It irks the hell out of me every time because I don’t believe they belong in the same sentence. Because they did not arrive at the same ending. The headline treats what happened in that basement in 1971 as something shared instead of something done.

My grandmother did not “die.” She was killed. He did not “die” with her. He killed her, and then he killed himself. But that is not the version my family was given.

What we have is a photocopy of a newspaper clipping. It is clean and authoritative, where the language had already done its work. Where the violence had already been softened, rearranged, and made easier to absorb. The story had already been rewritten.

Most coverage of murder-suicide ends at the scene. But I want to pick up where everyone else goes silent. I want Y’all to think about what it means to inherit something you didn’t witness, but still have to carry for the rest of your life. I want Y’all to think about the way violence travels without needing to be retold in full. The way it reorganizes a family’s emotional architecture, even for people like me who were not yet born.

What happened to my grandmother in 1971 exists as a kind of gravitational center, but the real focus is everything that radiated outward from it. There’s so much grief that didn’t get processed. Stories got buried or distorted. There’s all the ways her four daughters coped, or didn’t. So many fractured relationships. I ended up in the foster care system as a baby, a little over a decade after Katherine’s murder. There are so many emotional inheritances that showed up in my own life, and my siblings’ lives before any of us had words for them.

There’s so much I know now as a journalist and historian who dug up my family’s archival records. I understand trauma, how it lives in the body, and how it gets transmitted generationally. I can name what was happening beneath the surface in a way my biological family couldn’t at the time. Not in a clinical way, but in a clarifying way.

There’s also a quiet but devastating contrast. Back then, it was framed as tragedy, maybe even as a kind of mutual collapse. There was no language in the records of coercive control. No real public conversation about intimate partner violence the way we have now. If we interrogate the media framing, we can ask what was obscured, who was centered, and how that shaped the way my family processed the loss.

And then, I opened my phone yesterday and saw it happening all over again.

Different names: former Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax and his wife Dr. Cerina Fairfax. Different year: 2026. The same script was unfolding.

People were posting photos of Justin Fairfax smiling, nostalgically remembering him as a frat brother, a colleague, a good man. The images felt eerily familiar. A curated humanity placed carefully in front of the public, asking us to see him as more than what he had done, before we had even fully reckoned with what he had done. And then, the language softened and conversation turned. Commentators began talking about mental health, about stress, about pressure, about suicide being a leading cause of death among Black men. Experts were brought in to contextualize, to analyze, to explain.

And just like that, I felt something in my body recognize it before my mind could even fully process it. Because I have seen what comes after this kind of language. I have lived inside it and I know what it produces over time.

When people call this a mental health crisis, they think they are being compassionate. But what they are actually doing is recreating the exact conditions that allowed the damage to spread through families like mine in the first place. Because when you soften violence, you blur responsibility. And when you blur responsibility, you leave the rest of us holding something we cannot fully understand, let alone heal from.

Mental health did not pull a trigger in November 1971. Mental health did not pull a trigger here. A person did that. A man made a decision that ended a woman’s life, and then ended his own. Those are not interchangeable acts, and they should not be collapsed into the same narrative.

But that is exactly what happens when the language shifts too quickly toward explanation instead of accountability. The focus moves away from the violence itself and toward the internal world of the person who committed it. The conversation is about his stress, his unraveling, and his pain. Meanwhile, the woman becomes a detail in the story of his decline.

My grandmother was reduced to a line in a newspaper. Thirty-seven years old. Shot and killed. No motive. And then the story moved on.

What remained did not disappear. It settled into the family. It moved quietly through relationships, through silences, through the ways people coped or avoided coping. They way people got mad at me for asking questions and digging for answers and maybe even justice. It showed up in fractures that nobody could quite explain. It showed up in children who grew up without the language to understand what had shaped them.

Do Y’all know what it means to grow up in the shadow of something like that? To feel the weight of an event that shaped your entire family, but was never fully spoken about honestly? That is how trauma travels. Not just through what happened, but through what was refused, softened, or obscured afterward.

So when I watch people center Justin Fairfax’s internal world, I am not just watching commentary. I am watching the early stages of another Black family being handed a story that will not help them survive what just happened. I am watching the same narrative machinery that produced that photocopy in my family’s archive begin its work all over again.

What’s striking to me in this moment is how quickly people have arrived at a conclusion that the reporting itself does not support. There is no confirmed diagnosis being reported about Justin Fairfax. What we have are descriptions of behavior, references to stress, alcohol use, and fragments of a life under strain. And yet, almost instantly, the language across social media has hardened into a definitive “mental health crisis.” As if that has already been established.

That leap is not accidental. It is easier, psychologically and culturally, to locate violence inside something clinical than to sit with the possibility that it emerged from something far more ordinary and far more unsettling. If this crime be explained as mental illness, then it can be contained. It becomes an exception. A deviation. Something that belongs to a category of people who are “unwell,” rather than something that forces us to examine patterns of power, control, and entitlement that are far more widespread and far more normalized.

Calling it mental health also allows people to feel compassionate without being confrontational. It gives the appearance of nuance, depth, and care. But what it often does, in practice, is redirect attention away from the act itself and toward the inner life of the person who committed it. It centers his struggle. His pain. His unraveling. And in doing so, it quietly displaces the woman whose life was taken.

I understand the impulse. People want explanations. They want something to hold onto that makes this feel less random, less terrifying, less close to home. But not every act of violence is the product of a diagnosable condition. And when we rush to frame it that way without evidence, we are not being careful. We are being evasive.

Because the alternative is harder to face. The alternative is that a man, under pressure, in conflict, facing loss, made a decision that reflected how he understood his relationship, his power, and his right to control the outcome. That is not as easy to categorize and it doesn’t come with a clinical label. It doesn’t allow us to distance ourselves as neatly. Calling it mental health does nothing for the people who have to live in the aftermath.

It does nothing for the woman whose life was taken. It does nothing for her children, who are left to grow up inside a story that never quite names what happened. They’ve got to carry questions that don’t have answers and wounds that don’t have language. It does nothing for the families who inherit not just grief, but confusion. Not just loss, but a narrative that was softened at the very moment it needed to be clear. And it does nothing to interrupt the pattern.

If anything, it protects it.

Because this is not about a mysterious collapse that no one could have predicted. This is about power, control, and entitlement. It is about the belief that a woman’s life becomes negotiable when a man feels he is losing something, whether that is status, access, or identity. That is not a diagnosis. That is a toxic, fucked up worldview.

And until we are willing to name it clearly, without hiding behind softer language, we will keep producing the same headlines. We will keep producing families like mine. Families left with fragments and distortions. Families left trying to make sense of something that was never fully named.

I am part of that afterlife. And so are the Fairfax children. I did not witness what happened in that Paterson basement in 1971, but I have spent a lifetime living with what came after. I have lived with the silence, the confusion, the inherited weight of a story that never quite landed where it should have.

And I can tell you this with absolute certainty. You cannot build healing on top of a lie. You cannot process what you refuse to name. And you cannot keep calling this a mental health crisis without understanding that what you are really doing is rewriting the story in a way that someone else’s family will have to spend generations trying to undo.

You can’t call it a tragedy when one person made a decision that the rest of the family had to spend generations surviving.

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