A Tajik national committed to a Virginia psychiatric facility after being found not guilty by reason of insanity in his landlord's killing used escorted outings, including one to his home country's embassy, to obtain a passport and airline ticket, then fled the United States.
Abdulloi Doniyor Toshpulodzoda walked away from the Northern Virginia Mental Health Institute in Falls Church on a 48-hour authorized pass and boarded a Turkish Airlines flight to Istanbul, then continued to Dushanbe, Tajikistan. He left on July 6, 2026, just days after a judge found he remained mentally ill and ordered him to stay confined for inpatient treatment. The New York Post reported that Virginia law permits mental health facilities to grant committed patients unaccompanied community visits of up to 48 hours.
Now two Northern Virginia Democrats who represent the area are facing pointed questions about how the system let a man who killed his landlord obtain a foreign passport, secure a plane ticket, and leave the country, all while under state custody.
Before his escape, Toshpulodzoda was allowed out of the Falls Church facility at least twice under escort. The first trip, in 2024, took him to the Tajik embassy in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of Washington, D.C., where he obtained a passport. Laura Birnbaum, a spokesperson for Fairfax County Commonwealth's Attorney Steve Descano, told Fox News Digital that the office did not oppose that escorted embassy visit.
A second escorted outing brought Toshpulodzoda to an apartment in Alexandria. There, he obtained an airline ticket to Dushanbe. Who authorized each trip, and under what rationale, remains unclear. Fox News Digital reached out to the Tajik embassy for comment; no response has been reported.
Birnbaum said Descano's office had "successfully argued multiple times in court" against Toshpulodzoda's outright release. Prosecutors opposed his release at annual review hearings, including one in June 2026, where a judge ordered that he continue to be confined. That ruling came down on June 29, one week before he boarded his flight.
So the county's own prosecutors fought to keep him locked up, yet the facility let him walk out with a passport and an international plane ticket. Both things are true at the same time, and neither cancels the other out.
Rep. Donald Beyer, a Democrat whose district covers Alexandria, Arlington, and part of Fairfax County, including the mental health institute itself, acknowledged the breakdown when Fox News Digital pressed him. But he stopped well short of assigning blame.
"There's a failure in the system somewhere along the way. I don't know whether it's failure to put [Toshpulodzoda] in the mental hospital or the hospital didn't have the right security to keep them there. But no, we don't want bad guys on the loose."
Beyer also pushed back on the argument that Toshpulodzoda should have been deported rather than committed to a psychiatric facility.
"[Deportation] doesn't seem sufficient punishment for someone whose [committed] a major felony."
That framing raises its own question. Toshpulodzoda was found not guilty by reason of insanity, meaning a Virginia court determined he lacked criminal responsibility. He was committed, not sentenced. And the system Beyer now calls flawed produced the very outcome he says he presumed was justified: commitment instead of deportation. The man is now beyond the reach of American courts entirely.
Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, a Democrat representing Loudoun and Fauquier counties, offered a different deflection. Asked about the Toshpulodzoda case, he gave a general statement about holding criminal illegal immigrants accountable, then steered the conversation toward policing immigration agents.
"I've been pretty consistent that if someone's undocumented and they committed a crime, that they should be held accountable for the crime and we should look into whether they should be deported at that point."
He added that deportation decisions should go "case by case" and that "not every person who commits any crime should be deported automatically." In the next breath, he turned to what he described as the need for oversight of federal immigration officers.
"I want to make sure that if an ICE officer does the wrong thing that they're held accountable and there's not a cover up for them... that's what happened in the case of Renee Good was that a lot of public pressure led to some people getting removed, but that wasn't enough when they need to actually have the [DOJ and FBI investigate] and prosecute instances where they're going too far."
Good was an anti-ICE activist in Minnesota shot and killed by an ICE agent in January after officials said she tried to strike the agent with her car while shadowing immigration enforcement operations. Whatever the merits of that separate case, Subramanyam's pivot is striking: a reporter asked how an illegal immigrant who killed his landlord obtained a passport and fled the country from state custody, and the congressman's instinct was to talk about reining in the people who enforce immigration law.
Toshpulodzoda was originally committed in 2022 after a court found him not guilty by reason of insanity in the 2019 death of his landlord, Mohammad Hemmatian. Authorities have since issued a bench warrant and federal alerts in case he attempts to re-enter the United States. The Fairfax County Commonwealth Attorney's Office stated plainly: "If he enters the U.S., he will be arrested and brought to Virginia."
That promise carries limited weight. Toshpulodzoda is in Tajikistan, a Central Asian nation with no extradition treaty with the United States. He left on his own country's passport, obtained during a supervised outing from the very facility that was supposed to keep him confined. The bench warrant is a formality unless he is reckless enough to come back.
Several basic questions remain unanswered. Who at the mental health institute approved the escorted visits? What was the stated purpose of the Alexandria apartment trip? Did anyone flag the obvious risk of letting a foreign national visit his own country's embassy to get travel documents while under a commitment order? And is any state or federal agency investigating how this happened?
Virginia statute permits mental health facilities to grant committed patients unaccompanied community visits of up to 48 hours. That provision is designed for patients on a path toward reintegration, not for foreign nationals under insanity commitments who have every incentive to disappear. Yet the law apparently drew no distinction, and the facility used it to let Toshpulodzoda walk out the door.
Beyer said he did not know whether an investigation was underway. Subramanyam did not address the question directly. Descano's office pointed to its courtroom record opposing release but offered no explanation for why it did not oppose the 2024 embassy visit, the trip that gave Toshpulodzoda the one document he needed to leave the country.
A man killed his landlord in 2019. A court found him not guilty by reason of insanity. The state committed him. The facility let him visit a foreign embassy. He got a passport. The facility let him visit an apartment. He got a plane ticket. He flew to Tajikistan. And the elected Democrats who represent the area where all of this happened are split between calling it a vague "system failure" and changing the subject to ICE oversight.
When accountability is everyone's job in the abstract and nobody's job in particular, this is the result: an empty bed in Falls Church and a man beyond the law's reach in Dushanbe.
