Ex-police officer, daughter dead in Fairfax murder-suicide

Tue, 2012-03-27 19:00

A former Fairfax County police officer and his teenage daughter were found dead in a sport-utility vehicle Tuesday in what authorities said was an apparent murder-suicide.

Police received a call reporting a shooting at about 1:15 a.m. Tuesday. When officers arrived at a home on the 3800 block of Forest Grove Drive in Annandale, they found an SUV parked in the driveway that contained two bodies with gunshot wounds, Fairfax County police spokeswoman Mary Ann Jennings said.

Authorities identified the two as 40-year-old John Jackson, a 16-year veteran for the county police department who resigned in June 2010, and his daughter, 13-year-old Alexis Jackson.

Officer Shelley Broderick, another police spokeswoman, said a medical examiner will determine which death was a homicide and which was a suicide. She said it would be "overstepping" to make that determination before receiving the medical examiner's report.

Broderick said she had no information about what sparked the incident and would not say whether a weapon was recovered.

"That's all under investigation," she said.

A family member found the Jacksons shortly after 1 a.m. and the two are believed to have died between midnight and 1 a.m., police said. John and Alexis Jackson lived in Falls Church and the SUV was parked outside the home of another relative, Broderick said.

Alexis was a seventh-grade student at Glasgow Middle School in Alexandria, according to John Torre, a spokesman for Fairfax County Public Schools.

Broderick said she didn't know why Jackson left the police force or what he had been doing since leaving the department. The phone number listed for him in public records went to his voicemail at John and Robs Services, a family trash-hauling business.

The company's website says it was founded in 1952 by Joseph F. Jackson under the name Jackson and Sons General Hauling and Trash Removal. Two of Joseph Jackson's sons, Robert and John, took over the business in 1998, the website says.

No one at the Woodbridge-based business answered the phone or responded to an email Tuesday. A phone number listed for Jackson's Falls Church home was disconnected.