On June 11th a Fairfax judge ruled that a confessed killer was still mentally ill and dangerous and had to stay in the hospital. On July 6th the hospital let him walk out on an unescorted 48-hour pass — no judge required — and he flew to Dulles, then Istanbul, then home to Tajikistan. The law that let him do it is still on the books this morning. Here’s the statute, and here’s who can change it.
What You Need To Know:
“If the Commissioner is of the opinion that a temporary visit from the hospital would be therapeutic for the acquittee and that such visit would pose no substantial danger to others, the Commissioner may grant such visit not to exceed forty-eight hours.” — Va. Code § 19.2-182.4
The same section: the Commissioner “may make interfacility transfers and treatment and management decisions regarding acquittees in his custody without obtaining prior approval of or review by the committing court.“
Read those two sentences together and you have the whole story. The power to send a man committed for a killing out into the community, unescorted, for two days at a time, sits with one executive-branch official — and the judge who committed him is, by the plain text of the law, not allowed to weigh in.
In 2019, Abdulloi Toshpulodzoda stabbed the landlord he lived with in Vienna to death. Police found him covered in blood. He confessed. None of that was ever in dispute.
In October 2022, a Fairfax court found him not guilty by reason of insanity — his lawyers argued he was fixated on religious delusions and “illogical and nonsensical,” and Fairfax Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano’s office concurred in the acquittal (Daily Wire). He was committed to the Northern Virginia Mental Health Institute, a state hospital run under the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services.
From there, Virginia law does something most families would find hard to believe. As WTOP put it plainly, “Virginia law allows patients to acquire privileges as their treatment continues,” and “one of those privileges includes temporary day or weekend passes as long as clinical teams concur” (WTOP). Not a judge. A clinical team, signing off to the Commissioner.
On June 11, 2026, Judge Stephen Shannon reviewed the case and refused to release him, finding him still mentally ill and dangerous. That should have been the end of it. Instead, on July 6, 2026, the hospital granted Toshpulodzoda a 48-hour pass to an apartment provided through the Fairfax Permanent Supportive Housing Program — taxpayer-funded housing, for a man a judge had just called too dangerous to free (Fox News). He bought a one-way ticket and flew from Dulles to Istanbul, then to Dushanbe. By the time court records documenting the escape were filed in early August, he was already on the other side of the world.
A weekend pass gets a man to Dulles. It does not get him through an international departure gate. That takes a passport — and a passport took a trip to the Tajik Embassy in Washington, and that trip took someone asking a court for permission.
Here the record is more complicated, and honesty demands both halves of it. Back in May 2024, Descano’s office jointly supported a request to let Toshpulodzoda make an escorted visit to the embassy to obtain a passport (Daily Wire). His office has also said, accurately, that it opposed his release at the annual review hearings, including this past June. Both things are true at once. The office argued against setting him loose — and the office backed the step that handed him the one document he would need to disappear.
That is worth sitting with. But it is not the mechanism of the escape. The passport was the key. The 48-hour unescorted pass, granted with no judge in the loop under § 19.2-182.4, was the open door.
The public would know none of this if a reporter hadn’t gone looking. Luke Rosiak — a Fairfax County resident who has made a habit of reading the court filings the county would rather nobody read — turned up the records and broke the story (Daily Wire). The state agency involved won’t even discuss the case, citing privacy law (Washington Times). So the public gets the outcome without the reasoning: a man in state custody for a killing walked out unaccompanied, and the law that let him is still on the books this morning.
That is how accountability dies — not in a dramatic vote, but in a filing nobody announces and a statute nobody reads. It took one local reporter to drag it into daylight.
None of this was a freak accident. It was the law working exactly as written. And the law can be rewritten by the people who wrote it.
Section 19.2-182.4 is a product of the Virginia General Assembly, which Democrats control in both chambers, and it is administered by a Commissioner who answers to Democrat Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s administration. Every seat in the General Assembly is on the ballot in November 2027, and every member can be asked one simple question between now and then: does Virginia law still permit an unescorted weekend pass for a person a judge has ruled too dangerous to release after a killing? If the answer stays yes, they chose to keep it that way.
Steve Descano is on that same 2027 ballot.
Regular families in Fairfax did not ask for a system where a confessed killer gets a taxpayer-funded apartment and a two-day head start on a one-way flight. They are owed representatives — and a prosecutor — who will close the door § 19.2-182.4 left open.
Register. Vote. And between now and November 2027, make every one of them answer for this.