Where I live, tucked in the Virginia woods in D.C.’s outer suburbs, a body being found stabbed to death and doused in gasoline is virtually unprecedented. The murder was unsolved, and the killer could be lurking in any of our backyards.
I don’t typically go on Nextdoor, the hyperlocal social media app designed to bring neighbors together to discuss issues like community safety, but this seemed like exactly what it was made for. Everyone there was on edge.
Its users are already a notoriously jumpy bunch. Every Fourth of July, someone will invariably write that they think they heard gunshots. A man once pleaded with people on his block to stop using their fireplaces in the winter because the smoke coming from chimneys assaulted his nose on his afternoon walks.
Yet when an arrest was made, I could find no stand-down notification on the platform. So I took it upon myself to calm them with a one-sentence message: “A 19-year-old illegal immigrant has been arrested for stabbing the woman in Great Falls Park.”
Suddenly, the trembling fear of these residents of a wealthy D.C. enclave reversed. People who endlessly discussed the best way to rat on a neighbor with a barking dog to their HOA turned into gargoyles that took a blasé view of cold-blooded murder.
“Do you post every time a person from another race commits a crime? Or every time a U.S. citizen commits a crime?” a woman wrote.
“There have only been nine murders in Fairfax this year,” another said, as if that made it no big deal.
On a platform where a large portion of the posts are literally “I saw a fox, should I be concerned?” “I heard a loud noise” or “I lost my dog,” the threshold for alerting neighbors was suddenly revised: A literal murder in our backyards should go unexamined.
Someone posted a picture of white males and wrote, “These so called citizens kill more than any immigrant.” Similar posts followed, saying that residents of Fairfax County should instead be on the lookout for white men.
The fear they held hours prior was gone, along with any outrage that murder had crept into a peaceful place, or sympathy for the victim. Multiple people invoked an unnamed academic study which, they said, held that illegal immigrants are more law-abiding than Americans.
Of course, murder in Fairfax County is a rare enough thing that you don’t need an academic study: There had been eight people arrested for murder this year (one had two victims), so I replied by listing each of their names, along with their immigration status. Four were illegal immigrants. A fifth had a foreign name but an unknown immigration status. A sixth was a juvenile whose information was unknown.
I posted that list with no further comment.
Then I got an email that anonymous moderators had deleted my post for “discrimination.”
With the facts deleted, residents then suggested that the stabbing in our quiet community wasn’t at the hands of an illegal immigrant at all. After all, how could multiple sources fail to mention such an obviously significant fact if it were true?
“Where are you seeing he’s illegal? I’ve read several articles and not one said,” one said.
A killing in a town populated by Cabinet secretaries and Virginia’s former governor is a newsworthy event, so Fairfax County police chief Kevin Davis held a press conference. But when a reporter asked the killer’s immigration status, he, too,
Nextdoor’s moderators (the site literally encourages people to “report a neighbor” to its anonymous mods) seemed to be concerned that too many people were finding out the truth. A few hours after I posted the thread, I received another email saying my entire account had been “temporarily suspended” due to the original one-sentence post, and the whole thread was whisked into the ether.
Sean Kennedy, who runs a public safety nonprofit called Virginians for Safe Communities, postulated that the site may object to the language “illegal immigrant,” preferring euphemisms like “people who are unlawfully present.”
So he made a similar post without using the term.
His account, too, was banned.
It didn’t seem to be language they objected to — it was people knowing the facts at all. Those who posted the local TV story “Half of Fairfax County homicide suspects in 2026 are in the U.S. illegally” also were sanctioned.
Illegal immigrant crime has become a hot-button topic in Northern Virginia because any clear-eyed view of crime in general will spot the wildly disproportionate connection — and Democrats’ role in it. Just this week, we learned that an illegal alien and Islamic extremist who killed someone in Fairfax in 2019 fled the country after the local prosecutor, Steve Descano, helped him get a foreign passport.
Some Virginia residents have wondered: How can Fairfax residents keep voting for this? There are multiple reasons, but one is that they genuinely don’t know it’s happening.
Virginians elected Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, for governor just months ago. On her first day in office, she signed an executive order ending cooperation between Virginia’s prisons and ICE. This has been the focus of a high-profile dispute every time one of these murders occurs, with Spanberger refusing to agree to turn the murderer over for deportation after his sentence.
Yet when the area’s congressman, Don Beyer, was asked about this horrific case, he didn’t defend the Democrat line — he pretended it wasn’t happening. “My understanding of the law is anyone who’s committed a serious felony is turned over to ICE,” he said.
If Democrats want to run on a policy that illegal immigrants should be able to enter the country at will, and be helped to stay even after they kill someone, that’s their right. But doing it while hiding it, and the effects, shouldn’t be.
Hyperlocal social media is a promising idea, but Nextdoor has bungled the chance for billions of dollars as badly as Virginia’s politicians bungled the chance to save four people’s lives this year. Nextdoor’s message that at least half of actual Americans aren’t welcome as customers might explain why it is
Ironically, people in our sleepy corner of Fairfax County will be better informed by The Daily Wire, a Nashville-based publication, than by one that’s supposedly hyper-local. Here’s the truth about every alleged murderer in Fairfax this year:
- Abdul Jalloh, an illegal immigrant from Sierra Leone. Was arrested more than 30 times, but prosecutor Descano dropped the charges, enabling him to kill a stranger, Stephanie Minter, at a bus stop.
- Misael Lopez Gomez, a Guatemalan illegal immigrant, who allegedly beat a 3-month-old baby to death.
- Anibal Armando Chavarria Muy, a Guatemalan illegal immigrant who was arrested for stabbing a man to death.
- Alexis Antonio Cedillos-Campos from El Salvador, the illegal immigrant whose alleged murder was censored by Nextdoor
- Thapa Chhatra, whose immigration status is unknown and who was killed by police after stabbing three people
- An unknown juvenile
Only two 2026 murderers in Fairfax County are known to be Americans. One is Leland Jameson, a retired university professor and the only white man on the list. The other is Justin Fairfax — a black Democrat politician who served as lieutenant governor of Virginia and shot his wife in April.