FAIRFAX, Virginia – Attorney General Jason Miyares (R-VA) has called on Fairfax County Commonwealth Attorney Steve Descano to resign, accusing his office of mishandling multiple cases and handing out lenient plea deals.
While surrounded by more than a dozen victims, Miyares called for legislative reforms to protect future victims and hold prosecutors accountable. He released a 34-page report detailing misconduct, failures, and constitutional violations and is referring the matter to the Department of Justice for potential civil or criminal investigation.
“These are particularly heinous offenses,” Miyares said. “Few things are more egregious, than the idea that we have seen a pattern in this office of not standing up for children and their innocence.”
“Stop being a social worker, stop being a criminal defense attorney, start being a prosecutor,” Miyares said. “And if you’re not willing to do your job, resign. Somebody else will do it for you.”
He highlighted a case the county failed to prosecute against Richard Cox, a registered sex offender, who entered the female locker room at several recreation centers and high schools to watch women undress. He was able to enter the facilities by claiming to be transgender. Workers claimed he would strip down naked and walk around the locker room for hours. In police body cam, obtained by Washington Examiner, when officers banned him from Oakmont Rec Center, he claimed he was being discriminated against.
“I understand this whole transgender thing is new, it’s still being developed daily.” Cox said to two Fairfax county police officers. “My civil rights as a transgender person allows me to use a public facility including the restrooms or changing rooms that identify with my gender.”
Cox then accused the rec center of illegally using the sex offender registry to ban him from the facility, saying he belonged in the female locker room because his driver’s license listed him as female.
In 2020, the General Assembly changed the law to allow Virginians to change the sex on their state-issued driver’s license to their gender identity. Though Richard Cox is a biological male, he was able to obtain a state-issued driver’s license listing him as a female.
“On June 6, 2024 he went into Planet Fitness, where he used his state issued driver’s license to gain access,” Miyares said. “Claiming that he was transgender and accusing the victims that complained about him walking around as a biological male fully nude in the locker room, as having, ‘anti-trans discrimination.’ The Fairfax Commonwealth attorney’s office declined to participate in the prosecution of Cox, and the indecent exposure charge was later dismissed.”
Cox is currently in jail facing more than 30 charges in Arlington County for entering Washington Liberty High School locker room and performing a lewd act in front of children, and taking other indecent liberties with children from July to October 2024.
At this time, no charges have been filed against Cox in Fairfax County.
Miyares also highlighted the case of Bryan Rojas, who, after murdering a cat, took a machete and tried to attack a police officer. The prosecutor’s office reduced the charge to an assault battery against law enforcement. The courts rejected the proposed plea.
“They were rejected due to their offensiveness to the rule of law and the administration of justice,” Miyares said. “And partly because the utterly horrific, gruesome, devastating, and lethal wounds that killed the cat also could have taken the officer’s life.”
Another case was when Hyrum Baquedano-Rodriguez, an illegal immigrant from Honduras, broke into a home in the middle of the night and tried to abduct a four-year-old child. Even though there was overwhelming DNA evidence and the possibility for a life sentence the Commonwealth attorney reduced the sentence to two years.
“The judge noted, in rejecting this plea deal, this is every parent’s worst nightmare,” Miyares said. “The court concluded a criminal justice system that cannot protect a four year old child in such circumstances is a failure. That is a failure solely at the feet of Steve Descano.”
Descano called the report a political stunt.
“This is a sad, last-ditch political stunt by a man who’s about to lose an election,” Descano said. “His lies, half-truths and distortions don’t change the fact that voters elected me twice to run our justice system this way, and in doing so we’ve kept Fairfax the safest large county of its size in the country.”
Miyares is currently running for reelection for Attorney General in Virginia and is trailing his Democratic opponent Jay Jones by 7 points according to a recent Christopher Newport University poll.
