A Tajik national found not guilty by reason of insanity in his landlord's killing obtained a passport during a supervised outing from a Virginia psychiatric facility, then used a second pass to reach Dulles International Airport and fly home to Central Asia.
Abdulloi Doniyor Toshpulodzoda walked out of the Northern Virginia Mental Health Institute in Falls Church, boarded a flight at Dulles, and landed in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, by way of Turkey, all while under the nominal custody of Virginia's behavioral health system. The sequence has drawn sharp criticism of Fairfax County Commonwealth's Attorney Steve Descano, whose office did not oppose the escorted trip that let Toshpulodzoda pick up a Tajik passport in Washington, D.C.
The case lays bare a chain of decisions, by prosecutors, clinicians, and state officials, that handed an illegal immigrant acquitted of a violent killing the one document he needed to leave the country, and then gave him the unsupervised time to use it.
Toshpulodzoda entered the United States during the Obama administration and later violated the terms of his admission, according to the Department of Homeland Security. He was charged with killing his landlord, Mohammad Hemmatian, and reportedly told authorities he was guilty, but a court found him not guilty by reason of insanity. He was committed to the state-run psychiatric institute in Falls Church.
On May 29, 2024, prosecutor Claiborne Richardson, who works in Descano's office, and Toshpulodzoda's defense attorney, Amy Jordan, jointly requested and received court permission for Toshpulodzoda to travel roughly 20 miles to Washington, D.C., with institute staff. The purpose: obtaining a passport at the Tajik embassy.
A spokeswoman for Descano's office told Fox News Digital that the office "did not oppose" the escorted visit to obtain "updated documentation from the [Tajik] embassy." She added that the office's position on that outing was "not indicative of our position on community release" itself.
That distinction did not satisfy former Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares.
"Fairfax's Steve Descano supported a violent, committed man accused of killing his landlord to obtain a passport. The passport request should have been the five-alarm fire, but instead it was ignored and he was allowed to walk out of a mental facility and flee the country. This is an unconscionable level of incompetence."
Miyares also said flatly: "A judge said no, Virginia authorities said yes anyway."
Virginia law allows clinical teams at state psychiatric facilities to request "graduated privileges", community passes reviewed by experts before a patient advances to the next level of freedom. Laura Cunningham, a spokeswoman for the Virginia Department of Behavioral Health, described the process but cited federal and state privacy laws as reasons the agency could not discuss Toshpulodzoda's case publicly. Descano's office deferred questions about the day passes to the state agency.
Toshpulodzoda received two such passes. The first, in late May 2024, took him to the Tajik embassy with institute staff. The second came in July, when he was allowed to stay at an Alexandria apartment furnished through the Fairfax Permanent Supportive Housing Program, a county initiative run by the Fairfax-Falls Church Community Services Board.
During that second pass, Toshpulodzoda traveled to Dulles International Airport and boarded a flight to Dushanbe, Tajikistan, with a stop in Turkey. Just The News reported that the hospital had granted him a 48-hour weekend pass, and that once staff realized he was gone, the facility placed him on "escape status" and notified Virginia State Police, federal authorities, and Customs and Border Protection.
By then he was already overseas.
Descano's prosecutors reportedly opposed Toshpulodzoda's release at annual court hearings, citing public safety concerns. At a hearing in June, the office argued that Toshpulodzoda should remain in the institute's custody. The judge agreed.
Yet the same office did not oppose the supervised trip that put a passport in his hands. The contradiction is difficult to square: if Toshpulodzoda was too dangerous to release, why help him acquire the single document that would let him board an international flight?
An immigration judge had ordered Toshpulodzoda removed on June 24. DHS characterized his departure as "ultimate compliance" with that final removal order, a framing that treats the flight of a man under psychiatric commitment as a routine immigration outcome rather than a security failure.
Virginia authorities have since issued a warrant for Toshpulodzoda's arrest if he returns to the United States. Fox News Digital reached out to the Tajik embassy, the Fairfax County Sheriff's Office, the State Department, and the Community Services Board for comment; none of those responses were noted in the reporting.
Descano is a Democratic prosecutor in a heavily Democratic jurisdiction just outside Washington, D.C. George Soros, the Hungarian American billionaire, contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Descano's local races, a connection that has drawn renewed attention as the Toshpulodzoda case circulates online.
Conservative commentator Mary Katharine Ham posed a pointed question:
"If Descano policies were literally written by illegal immigrant confessed murderers in mental institutions, how would they be different?"
Columnist Tim Carney, himself a Fairfax County resident, wrote on social media that his "local prosecutor Steve Descano has a unique deportation policy." He added: "He endorsed giving an accused murderer, who was deemed insane, permission to travel to DC to get a passport. The accused murderer, on weekend leave, then hopped on a plane and fled to Asia."
Former police officer and commentator Brandon Tatum summed it up in two words: "Total system failure." Virginians for Safe Communities, an advocacy group that tracks crimes involving foreign nationals and illegal immigrants, asked on social media: "You hear the one about the crazed killer who walked into Dulles and went to Tajikistan?"
Several basic facts remain unclear. The reporting does not specify the exact date in July when Toshpulodzoda flew out, or whether any agency attempted to flag his passport with travel restrictions after the immigration judge ordered his removal. It is also unclear whether extradition or any international process has been initiated to bring him back.
The Virginia Department of Behavioral Health has hidden behind patient-privacy statutes. Descano's office has pointed fingers at the state agency. DHS has recast a fugitive's escape as "compliance." And the man who admitted to killing his landlord is now beyond the reach of every one of them.
When every agency in the chain can point to someone else's jurisdiction, accountability doesn't fall through the cracks, it never existed in the first place.
