Grief has no expiration date, and there’s no statute of limitations on murder.
Twenty-one years ago this summer, Steve Cornejo was shot in the back and died in the courtyard of an apartment complex in Fairfax, Va. Cornejo was unarmed. Brandon Gotwalt, who shot him in the back, initially told police he wasn't on the scene, then claimed self-defense, then admitted to flushing the spent shell and his shirt down the toilet, then admitted to carrying an illegally concealed .38 caliber handgun, then said the shooting was accidental. The shooter was never arrested or charged with any crimes.
“They treated him like, ‘Oh, just another dead Latino,’” said Isabelle Janus-Clark, Cornejo’s high school classmate and childhood friend. “The police just acted like he wasn’t worth the trouble. He was worth the trouble.”
Cornejo’s death has weighed on the people who knew and loved him for more than two decades now. Over the years, various attempts have been made to get his case reopened. Cornejo’s family and friends still want to know exactly what happened that night, and still believe that justice has yet to be served.
None of these attempts have been successful, but the latest was led by Jessica Menjivar, who turned 18 years old on the day Cornejo was killed. Menjivar, Cornejo’s cousin and childhood pal, found a trove of legal records from the killing and its aftermath in her mother’s attic, and spent much of the past 15 months poring through them and revisiting what she calls the worst days of her life.
“None of it ever made sense,” she said. “Who gets treated the way [the shooter] got treated? Why did he get away with it?”
Those are questions lots of folks involved in the case have had for a long time, as it has been defined by two competing narratives of the killing. One came from Fairfax County law enforcement, which ultimately presented its version to a seven-person grand jury that declined to bring charges against Gotwalt. The other came from a civil trial, which resulted in Cornejo’s family being awarded nearly $2 million by another jury.
“I was just thinking about that case recently,” said Malik Cutlar, the attorney who represented the Cornejo estate in the wrongful death lawsuit. “Thinking about the hostility that the Fairfax police showed toward the family, and me for representing the family. And the affinity that they showed the shooter, considering he took somebody's life and then lied to them when they questioned him and also hid evidence. Also thinking about the fact that the family has gone all these years without a loved one. Still stuck with that.”
The shooter never paid the family a dime of the civil trial award. Instead, he declared bankruptcy.
Cornejo was 23 years old in June 2005 when he was shot after leaving a party in the same apartment complex where Gotwalt lived. Fairfax County police and paramedics came to the courtyard and found two people who lived in the apartment complex, neither of whom knew Cornejo, kneeling next to him trying to save him. One of the strangers had taken off his own shirt and used it to try to stop the blood from pouring out of the hole in Cornejo’s back. He died where he lay.
It wasn’t law enforcement who initially told Cornejo’s family that he had died. Cornejo’s father, Austin Cornejo, rushed down to the state medical examiner’s office after a family friend called, saying he’d heard Steve was killed outside a party overnight. Austin Cornejo was not allowed into the morgue to identify his son’s body. The adversarial and secretive behavior of the authorities caused some members of the traumatized family to hold on to hope that Cornejo wasn’t actually dead, and had instead been arrested. The catastrophic reality eventually set in.
“We told my grandmother that Steven was missing for a few days,” Menjivar said. “When we finally told her he was dead, god, the shriek. I still remember the shriek.”
Nobody from the family had access to the body until the county released Cornejo’s corpse to a funeral home.
“You could still see all the scars from the beating he took before he was shot,” Menjivar said. She said the family picked a cemetery close to Fairfax for his burial, “in case they wanted to exhume the body.”
The county kept more than the corpse from Cornejo’s family. Fairfax County police also refused to let them see any police reports or other information from their investigation, even after public records requests. Robert Horan Jr., the serially elected commonwealth’s attorney, wouldn’t even provide the shooter’s name to the family for nearly a year. Horan would only say that Cornejo was shot by a neighbor, and declined the family’s requests for a meeting.
Friends of Cornejo held various vigils and a fundraiser to help the family pay for some of the answers they sought. The family put together enough money to hire a private investigator and lawyer to get them the information they reasonably expected the police and prosecutors to provide.
“That was my first lesson in how unjust our legal system can be,” said Kelley Higgins, another childhood friend and high school classmate of Cornejo’s, about Horan’s non-prosecution. “Looking back, we knew what was going on was wrong, but now I wish we were educated enough to know how wrong it was. The ball was dropped from the get-go. It’s kind of hard to have perspective on any of it, because I don’t know that anything was done the way it was supposed to be. Twenty years later, I’m still left with more questions than answers.”
The family did not get the name of the shooter until they filed a wrongful death lawsuit in the Circuit Court of Fairfax County in March 2006. The original complaint had to list the defendant as “John Doe.”
The family eventually learned that Cornejo had been killed by Gotwalt, a white U.S. Navy veteran who lived catty-corner to the killing scene. The Falls Church News-Press reported that Gotwalt, 26 years old at the time of the shooting, had previously been an aviation electronics technician and an air warfare specialist 2nd Class in the service. In court filings, he listed his occupation as hardware engineer for Argon ST, a defense contractor and subsidiary of Boeing based in Fairfax.
Horan died in 2022, as did Chester Toney, the lead detective. Gotwalt declined Defector’s requests to discuss the case or provide sources who could tell his side of the story, saying in an email, “I have no comment on this matter.”
At the time of the killing, Horan was the most popular and powerful elected official in one of America’s richest counties; in 2003, in what would turn out to be his last campaign for office, he didn’t even have an opponent. He told local media the shooter had confronted Cornejo to “prevent an assault that was going on [on] a young woman.” Horan said the state’s toxicology report showed Cornejo was “very, very drunk” when he “attacked” the good Samaritan. Cornejo had no weapon, Horan admitted, but the shooter only got out his gun because he was getting beaten up by his attacker. “Many people saw them on the ground wrestling,” Horan said, “with Cornejo getting the best of it."
Horan’s telling was based on police reports produced at the scene and the results of Detective Toney’s investigation. According to Toney’s report, Cornejo left the party with one male and one female friend around 4:30 a.m. Cornejo had been drinking heavily—his BAC was .20, according to the autopsy report—and he got into a loud altercation with the woman, with whom he used to have a romantic relationship, outside of the party. Their shouting woke up several people who lived in the complex, including Gotwalt. According to Toney’s final report on the case, the other man saw Cornejo grab the woman and shove her against a wall. According to an interview transcript, when the woman was interviewed by a detective, she said she didn’t remember much of what had happened and answered, “No, no sir” when asked if she felt like she had been “hit, slapped or anything like that.”
Gotwalt, who had also been out drinking that night with friends, told police that he woke up a friend who had fallen asleep on his couch and told him to call 911. He then grabbed his girlfriend’s gun and went outside. Gotwalt said he confronted the trio and told them police were on the way. At that point, Cornejo’s male friend convinced the woman to leave with him, and they drove away. Several witnesses then saw Cornejo and Gotwalt get into a physical altercation, which ended with Cornejo being beaten and shot in the back.
Gotwalt then returned to his apartment, where he washed the blood off himself, ripped his shirt up so that he could flush it down the toilet, washed his shorts, cleaned the gun, and flushed the spent shell down the toilet as well. When police first spoke to him, he denied being on the scene, but hours later, after his glasses and sandals were found in the courtyard, Gotwalt admitted to being the man who shot Cornejo.
Horan, an old-school law-and-order guy who said he liked to make the call in tough cases, instead left the charging decision up to a grand jury. In July 2005, he announced that the grand jury declined to indict the shooter. According to the Washington Post, the Cornejo case marked only the third time that Horan, then in his 38th year in office, took a case to a grand jury but got no indictment. Toney, who maintained that no witness actually saw the moment Cornejo was shot, presented the case to the grand jury. (Kyle Mandelbaum, assistant commonwealth attorney for Fairfax County, told Defector the commonwealth’s attorney’s office does not have a transcript of Toney’s grand jury testimony in the Cornejo case, and that under state law, that transcript and all other grand jury transcripts can only be released by court order.)
Austin Cornejo said he was waiting in a hallway outside the grand jury room of Fairfax County Courthouse when Toney came out and told him there would be no charges filed against the man who shot his son.
“I approached Chester Toney and say, ‘What happened?’” Austin Cornejo recalled. “He said no, he wasn’t charged. I fell down and fainted. On my knees, I said, ‘God, why is this happening?’”
Much of Toney’s narrative of the shooting was undermined by testimony at the civil trial. A key witness for the plaintiffs was a man named Giuseppe Amodeo, who lived in the apartment complex where Cornejo was killed. Transcripts from the case show Amodeo told the court that he watched the fight between Cornejo and Gotwalt through his bedroom window from “five to ten feet” away. At the civil trial, Amodeo testified that he saw Cornejo being pistol-whipped in the head and that Gotwalt “got the upper hand,” just before moving behind Cornejo and shooting him in the back. He also testified that he heard someone shout, “Why are you trying to take my life?” multiple times before the shot rang out, which was corroborated by a second witness’s testimony. This second witness said he also watched the fight from his apartment, and that after hearing the gunshot and seeing the muzzle flash, he saw “the guy on top” run away. Gotwalt admitted under questioning from Cutlar that he was not the one yelling.
Amodeo spoke to police in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, but the reports of what he saw produced at the scene did not provide the same level of detail as in his testimony from the civil trial. One report states that Amodeo heard two gunshots. "At the scene, they just didn't get his statement right or they took it down wrong," Cutlar later told the Washington Post in 2008. "They made up their mind and they're sticking to it."
When asked about Amodeo’s testimony during the civil trial, Toney told the court, “He is not being truthful.” Toney admitted that he never personally interviewed Amodeo, but pointed out that Amodeo did speak with another detective, Steve Shillingford, at some point after the shooting. When reached for comment by Defector, Shillingford stated that he could not remember specifically interviewing Amodeo, but said there would be a transcript of their conversation if he did. Jessica Cox, the manager of the Fairfax County Police Department’s FOIA compliance division, declined Defector’s requests to release any such transcript. Amodeo did not respond to several interview requests from Defector.
The woman who was at the party with Cornejo before the shooting also testified at the civil trial. She said that she and Cornejo did get into a loud argument outside of the party, but that there was no physical altercation. A police report said she was “visually examined” on the day of the shooting, and “no injuries were seen.” Cutlar presented photos taken by police during her interview after the killing that showed no marks on her face, neck or arms. The other man who was with them also testified, and said that he couldn’t remember any physical assault taking place.
Gotwalt said on the stand that he never checked on Cornejo after shooting him. Instead, he went back to his apartment to destroy evidence. Gotwalt had told police he’d been drinking, first at a nearby TGI Fridays after work on the night of the shooting, then more at home after leaving his car at the bar and walking home, but there is no record that he was ever administered a blood alcohol test. Transcripts show that Gotwalt admitted to Cutlar that he threw the first punch in their encounter, after Cornejo “stepped into” him.
One police report—which the family got a copy of in 2006 through the civil court process—said the gun was “accidentally discharged.” During the civil case, Toney testified that Gotwalt was getting his “ass whipped.” Court records showed that Toney admitted under questioning from Cutlar that it was Gotwalt who told him Cornejo was winning the fight, and Toney admitted that he’d never heard that story from any of the witnesses.
Toney continued to maintain that nobody but Gotwalt and Cornejo saw the shooting that ended the fight, even though 911 logs turned over by Fairfax County to the family during the civil case had an entry about the killing: “Caller says he saw two white males fighting in the common area outside the apartment,” it reads, “saw one pull out a gun and shoot the other and watched as he ran off.” (Defector submitted a public records request for recordings of 911 calls related to the Cornejo shooting. A spokesperson for the Fairfax County Department of Public Safety Communications, which maintains 911 recordings, said all calls are purged from the system after 180 days.)
Members of Cornejo’s family said on top of all the horrors they heard from the witness stand, they had to watch the lead detective and the killer acting like pals during breaks in the trial.
“Brandon Gotwalt and Chester Toney are sitting at a table laughing together, haha, haha,” Menjivar said. “Brandon Gotwalt, who killed somebody, and he’s laughing with the lead detective in the case about the guy he killed. I will never forget the image in my head. It still makes me sick.”
Menjivar described Cornejo, who was four years older than her, as her hero and protector. Throughout her childhood, she and her mom shared a house in Falls Church with Cornejo, his dad, and other cousins, aunts, and uncles. She had graduated from high school just four days before the shooting, and was planning to go away to college at the end of summer.
She tried sticking to that plan, but depression from Cornejo’s killing and the hateful aftermath caused Menjivar to drop out as a freshman. After a couple years off, she went back to school, got a couple of degrees, became a therapist, got married, had a kid, and tried moving on. That didn’t work out so well either.
“I think the moral to the story of Steven, for me, is that no matter how many years go by, you never forget that person,” she said. “You kinda just learn to live your life. It never goes away. You just live with the fact that that person is not there.”
Menjivar realized just how damaged she was when she found a blue milk crate full of papers while cleaning out her mother’s attic a couple years ago. The bin contained several hundred pages of records about Cornejo’s killing. She avoided diving too deep into the awful artifacts at first, but that changed when she lost her job last year, and she spent much of the downtime while out of work with the paperwork.
“Going through the files,” she said, “became my full-time job.”
Among the horrors she found was a collection of photos of Cornejo taken by the family in his coffin before his funeral, the first time they saw his body after he was shot. The family said they were denied access at the morgue and were unable to see the body until the night before the funeral at the funeral home, and that they had not been given autopsy photos. So they took pictures of the gashes and scabs on top of his head, and lumps on his forehead, all signs that he was badly beaten before he was killed, still visible through the heavy makeup applied by the funeral home. There are also photos of Cornejo’s hands, showing no marks.
Menjivar's pain about the loss of her cousin went from chronic to acute. She feared sinking back to the same depressed state Cornejo’s death sent her into in 2005, and sought professional help again this past summer.
“My therapist told me to write [the shooter] a letter, tell him whatever I feel about him, write it down,” she said. “She said if I hate him, tell him I hate him … And I do hate him.”
Menjivar wrote the letter, but didn’t finish, and didn’t tell me exactly what she typed. “I’m not going to send it,” she said.
The therapy sessions convinced her not to just dwell on the awful past. She wanted to act.
Menjivar reached out to me after finding my name and old contact information scribbled in her mother’s handwriting on one of the court filings. When Cornejo was killed, I worked for Washington City Paper, an alternative newspaper in D.C. I wrote mostly about sports, and initially covered his killing because Cornejo had been captain of his high school’s state championship soccer team. I kept writing about the county’s withholding information from the family and public, the civil case, and bankruptcy.
Menjivar asked me if I would meet with her family, and I agreed. She wanted to talk about her plan to ask the county to reopen a murder case.
We got together in July 2025 outside the Falls Church Community Center, a building where Menjivar said Cornejo chaperoned her dances back when she was in middle school and he was the soccer star at George Mason High School. Her mom, Corina Cornejo; Steven’s father, Austin Cornejo; and an uncle, Carlos Cornejo, also came along. Menjivar brought hundreds of pages of documents from the original police investigation and civil trial in the milk crate she found them in.
Austin Cornejo, now 67, is a native of Bolívar, La Unión Norte, El Salvador. He came to the U.S. for work in 1981, and eventually all six of his brothers and sisters followed him to this country. His son, Jack Steven Cornejo, was born at Arlington Hospital in 1982. Austin and Steve’s mother split, and he moved with the boy into a house with several siblings and their kids in Falls Church.
Corina Cornejo said she and other family members left their homeland to find prosperity, and found it here, enough to “love this country.” Then this country didn’t love them back.
Cornejo was killed just as Fairfax County was being targeted by local and national right-wing agitators due to the number of Central Americans who were settling there. At the time, Northern Virginia police departments were openly targeting Hispanics while hyping up their battle against alleged gang members. In December 2003, Fairfax County Police Gang Unit officer Kenny Compher told local media that “95 percent” of his unit’s investigations were directed toward MS-13, a Salvadoran gang with roots in 1980s Southern California. There was a much-hyped alleged MS-13 assault in Fairfax County three weeks before Cornejo was shot. Salvadorans make up Virginia’s largest immigrant group by a wide margin, and Compher said that Fairfax had “the second largest MS-13 presence” in the country. The Northern Virginia Regional Gang Task Force got a $2 million federal grant in 2004.
“The police asked me if Steve had gang ties,” Frank Spinello, his high school soccer coach, told me in 2006. Cornejo had none.
More ugliness centered on Herndon, a town in Fairfax County that had become known among contractors throughout the D.C. area as a gathering place for day laborers. The workers were overwhelmingly immigrants from El Salvador, and had for years gathered outside a local 7-Eleven to pick up jobs. The flashpoint came when a charity called Project Hope and Harmony proposed using county funds to transform a former police station in Herndon into a center for the laborers.
I was born and raised in Fairfax County, and I’d never encountered a more openly racist movement than the one spawned by the worker center proposal. The local opposition to the center was led by Ann V. Null, a town council member who referred to the local immigrants as "cooks, maids, janitors and gardeners." A 2005 article in the Post said that Erin Anderson, an anti-immigrant activist, had “lectured the Herndon Planning Commission about how illegal immigrants spread diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, leprosy and HIV.” The story went national largely because of the hype from WMAL, a D.C. talk radio station whose lineup included Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. Locally based WMAL host Chris Core helped ratchet up the racism by calling Northern Virginia the “beachhead” for the national immigration reform battle, and pulling stunts like doing his show live from town hall. The Post reported that Mark Williams, another WMAL host, urged listeners to show up at a town council meeting to protest the center "whether you're from Herndon or Timbuktu.” The station’s pleas to bombard elected officials were answered. Herndon’s town manager, Steve Owens, closed down the phone banks at town hall after what he said was “a tsunami” of calls. "They were vile and resembled hate speech,” Owens told the Post. “They were anti-immigrant.”
Such was the mood in Northern Virginia when unarmed Steve Cornejo was shot in the back, and Robert Horan Jr., an elected official, decided not to prosecute the shooter.
“We came to get jobs and work. We paid taxes. We didn’t come to ask what we can get,” Corina Cornejo said. “That’s how we raised our children. We lose the person that we love, and we think we’re going to find justice, and it’s not there. It may be there for other people. But for us? Nothing was done.”
Austin Cornejo was a little more direct. “Robert Horan was racist,” he said. “And Robert Horan was with them, not us. We had no chance.”
The jury at the civil trial deliberated for a day and found Gotwalt liable for Cornejo’s wrongful death, awarding the plaintiffs $1.95 million in compensatory damages, plus $16,588 for funeral expenses. The News-Press reported that the family had asked the court for just $300,000 in damages before the verdict. Fairfax County Circuit Judge David Stitt had barred the jury from awarding punitive damages because "the evidence in this case simply doesn’t rise to the level that’s required to even get to the jury on punitive damages.” The jury had also been instructed to apply Virginia’s contributory negligence doctrine, which stipulates that the family of the deceased in a wrongful death suit can’t be awarded damages if the deceased contributed even one percent to their own death.
“We left a message for the shooter,” said Jo Gorham, one of several members of the jury in Cornejo v. Gotwalt whom Defector recently interviewed. “The guy had no reason to go shoot him at all.”
“I wanted to get it as high as we could possibly get it,” said another juror, who requested their name and gender be withheld from the story.
All the jurors interviewed said that after hearing the evidence, they wondered why the shooter faced no criminal charges, especially after learning that the police knew Gotwalt had flushed his shirt, hid the bullets and even lied to cops while covering up his deed. “I don’t know how this was a civil case,” said Shawn Dolan, another juror. “We all struggled with that. It seemed like there were gaps in the investigation, where it didn’t get prosecuted, I didn’t understand that. We felt like we were in the middle of a criminal trial.”
The jurors also told Defector that the evidence didn’t back up Toney’s version of the shooting. The plaintiff’s attorney introduced a photo of Gotwalt’s face taken by police that showed no apparent marks.
In killing cases, the corpse often gets to be a star witness; an anonymous but apropos quote from the forensic science field holds that “the dead body is extremely eloquent.” Cornejo almost didn’t get his chance at the civil trial. Gotwalt’s attorney asked the court to disallow the plaintiff from presenting medical examiner Frances P. Field, who conducted the autopsy on Cornejo for the state of Virginia, as an expert witness. Stitt accepted that motion, ruling Field had been presented by the plaintiff too late to be designated as an expert. Stitt allowed Field to testify despite the defense’s objections, but told her she could not give “opinions” on the autopsy results she presented from the stand. In a recent interview, Field told Defector she’d testified at “hundreds of cases” in her nearly 30 years as an examiner, and had never been handcuffed by a court as she was in the Cornejo case.
“You have to be declared an expert to give a cause of death, that’s why they were blocking me from being an expert witness,” she said. “I don’t know how they were able to do that, but they did. That had never happened to me before.”
The removal of the expert tag also meant the official cause of death listed on the medical examiner’s report—“Penetrating gunshot wound of thorax”—was redacted when the document was entered as evidence.
But again, despite the repeated protests of Gotwalt’s attorney, Field was able to go over the facts from the inquest, provide illustrations and diagrams showing Cornejo’s wounds, and describe what she saw. According to the jurors, even under the court’s odd restrictions, Field’s presentation was devastating enough.
The autopsy report included drawings of Cornejo’s body that showed three separate contusions on his forehead, and two more on the back of his head. The report said the examiner found an “underlying subscapular hemorrhage” in both locations, meaning bleeding beneath the scalp, a sign that the wounds likely resulted from significant impact. The report also showed more than two dozen other abrasions and contusions all over his face and body, as well as the bullet hole in his back.
“The coroner’s drawings, I just stared at those for a very, very long time,” Gorham said. “Staring at the gunshot wound. I just couldn’t stop looking at it.”
“He was so beaten,” said the juror who requested anonymity. “He was broken down.”
Dolan, who describes himself as a former police officer and licensed concealed-carry gun owner, said Gotwalt’s version of events never added up to self-defense for any jurors. Dolan said he was swayed by Gotwalt’s admission, under cross-examination by Cutlar, that he was 100 feet away from Cornejo at one point in their encounter and could have simply gone back to his apartment instead of continuing their shouting match. Dolan also didn’t buy Gotwalt’s claim that he was getting choked with Cornejo on top of him just prior to the gun going off, not with the autopsy showing the gun was pressed directly against Cornejo’s back when it was fired.
“That body told a story,” Dolan said. “That means [Gotwalt] was pointing the barrel of the gun right at his own chest. Nobody is going to do that.”
A fourth juror, also requesting anonymity, said the bullet hole location and other autopsy evidence destroyed the defendant’s case in the minds of her and everybody else on the panel. “How did he get shot in the back, and the guy could claim self-defense?” she said.
Dolan said he thinks back to the case fairly often, and when he does, his thoughts are “mostly sad.”
“But I get pissed that people didn’t do their job, and the question is why didn’t they do their job?” he said. “It 100 percent feels like they walked away from that investigation intentionally. It would be nice if somebody reopened it. I like justice. I like it when the law works. It didn’t in this case.”
Asked what thoughts they came away with from the trial, an unnamed juror said, “Some people are so very privileged, and some people are so very not.”
Gorham told me she recently pulled out a newspaper clipping of the trial she’s kept all these years, and got “traumatized” all over again. She said she still doesn’t understand why there was only a civil case in the Cornejo killing. “Why was he so protected?” she said of the shooter. “I haven’t come up with anything yet.”
Gotwalt appealed the verdict, arguing among other things that the plaintiff’s side had not proven any cause of death, and that Cornejo possibly died from a heart attack, alcohol consumption or “he could have had a stroke.” But the jury award was upheld by the Supreme Court of Virginia in late 2007.
Even before his appeal of the civil trial verdict was denied, Gotwalt had already filed in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Virginia for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protections. Cornejo’s family contested Gotwalt’s bankruptcy petition, with Cutlar pointing out in filings that bankruptcy laws specifically prevent the discharge of debts incurred due to “willful and malicious injury by the debtor to another entity.”
U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Stephen S. Mitchell ruled that Cornejo “died from a gunshot wound to the back from a weapon fired by” Gotwalt, and that Gotwalt’s “killing of Mr. Cornejo was not justified as a lawful act of self-defense.” But Mitchell also ruled that because the civil trial jury had been prevented from considering punitive damages, Gotwalt’s actions did not necessarily meet the bankruptcy laws’ “willful and malicious” criteria, and thus all debt from the verdict was “dischargeable.” The family appealed the decision, but Mitchell’s order absolving Gotwalt of any financial obligation for the killing was upheld.
Austin Cornejo said the government letting Gotwalt stiff the family financially never hurt him anywhere near as much as having the county let the shooter off criminally.
The Cornejo family wrote to Horan after the civil trial, asking him to reconsider its decision to not charge Gotwalt with murder, and in their letter included a compilation of evidence presented in the civil case that had not been presented to the grand jury. Falls Church Mayor Robin Gardner also publicly blasted Horan’s handling of the criminal case and asked him to reopen the investigation. In a 2007 interview, she told me Horan didn’t respond. She also asked the county auditor to conduct an official review of Toney’s investigation. No results of any such audit were ever publicly released.
I interviewed Horan about the case after the civil trial, and he defended the non-indictment of Gotwalt, given what the county’s investigation had found. “You can’t make chicken salad out of chicken feathers,” Horan told me. “This story as originally told was the story of a good Samaritan, and there was no evidence to the contrary.” Horan also said at that time the cops would take another look.
Horan retired at the end of 2007 without reopening the case, and only briefly came out of retirement the next year to get the death penalty against serial killer Alfredo Prieto, a Salvadoran immigrant. Raymond Morrogh, a Horan subordinate for 24 years, was elected in 2007 to replace him. Gardner pressed Morrogh during that campaign to reopen the Cornejo case. He responded with a letter in July 2008, in which he laid out his reasons for not reopening the case. After Fairfax County authorities denied Defector’s FOIA request for Morrogh’s letter, we obtained a copy through a public records request to the city of Falls Church. In the letter, Morrogh largely focuses on the inconsistencies between witness testimony that was given at the scene and the civil trial. The letter claims that Detective Shillingford interviewed Amodeo again after the conclusion of the civil trial, and that Amodeo could not provide an explanation for why his testimony had changed. The letter also claimed that Toney’s investigation revealed that Cornejo had a “propensity for violence when intoxicated,” which included “five or six prior incidents.” Morrogh argued in his letter that such information would have been potentially exculpatory at a criminal trial.
Morrogh did not respond to Defector’s request to be interviewed for this story. Stitt died in 2008. Cutlar left private practice and is now an administrative law judge with the federal government. Morrogh was voted out of office in 2019 in favor of Steve Descano, a progressive candidate who ran on a justice reform platform, pledging to give minorities in the county a better shake from law enforcement.
The family told me recently that Gotwalt at no point showed any remorse for the killing, let alone apologized. Austin Cornejo said that the closest thing to justice the family ever got came during the civil case, when he found himself face to face with Gotwalt in a hallway.
“I told him, ‘You will burn in hell,’” Austin Cornejo said. “And he will.”
Menjivar says that over the summer of 2025 she had tried a few phone calls to the commonwealth’s attorneys office, hoping to set up a meeting to discuss her cousin’s case, but she never got past a receptionist telling her that prosecutors don’t take such meetings. Lacking any other recourse, she showed up at the Fairfax County Courthouse on a Monday morning in late September, unannounced and with no great expectations. I tagged along. Just a few minutes after she explained her situation to the first staffer we encountered at the county prosecutor's main office, out came Travis Lafay, an assistant commonwealth’s attorney. He led us around a corner to a quiet area in the massive, very populated complex.
“People get married here sometimes,” Lafay said of the courthouse, “but that’s the only happy thing in this building.”
Menjivar began telling the story of her cousin and his unprosecuted killer, but Lafay cut her off, quickly but politely. He told Menjivar he could not discuss specifics about the case, and did not want to hear any details about any alleged crime, because that would make him a potential witness should the case be prosecuted. He said that before Descano’s office would take any steps toward reopening a case, the police would need to reopen the criminal investigation first. Any evidence the police find would be turned over to the commonwealth’s attorney, and would be considered before any decision on whether to move forward.
He gave her the address of the proper police precinct that would handle the matter, and asked her if she had any questions. She dabbed at her eyes and sobbed quietly while hearing Lafay go over the next steps.
Before we left, Lafay asked Menjivar a question. “Tell me about your cousin,” he said. “What do you remember about him?”
“His smile,” she said, crying harder.
Menjivar’s next stop was the Fair Oaks District Police Station, the Fairfax precinct closest to the site of Cornejo’s killing. She told an attendant at the front desk she would like to talk with somebody about restarting an investigation, and was directed to wait in the lobby. After about an hour, Officer P. Hernandez (FCPD would only give out title, first initial, and last name of officers) came out and summoned us to a small interrogation room. Hernandez took notes about the name of the victim and date he was killed; Menjivar said that they know who the shooter is, but he was not charged.
“Evidence came out in the civil trial that was not presented to the grand jury,” she said, adding that eyewitness testimony led to the wrongful death finding. Hernandez jotted down more notes, then said she was going to talk to her superiors, and told Menjivar to wait some more. Menjivar wondered if she’d already spent more time in a police station than Gotwalt ever did. After a little more than an hour, Hernandez reappeared with Officer T. Moyer, who quickly said they’d talked to higher-ups and FCPD’s cold case staff about her visit, and that Detective Jon Long from that unit would soon be in touch. Menjivar left feeling very good about how her day had gone, considering both the courthouse and police station visits were essentially cold calls to strangers.
“The cold case detective called within two hours of me leaving the police station,” Menjivar told me later that day. “He called me.”
Long is something of a celebrity among local law enforcement, having been profiled along with cold case partner Melissa Wallace in Northern Virginia, a regional glossy monthly magazine, for their unit’s cracking an unsolved murder from 1989. Long told Menjivar he wanted to meet, and soon. They set a date for Sept. 26 at police headquarters.
Menjivar prepared for her meeting with Long like a student cramming for a final exam. She read through every transcript and police report in the milk crate at least one more time, and put together a four-page “cheat sheet” of the major takeaways from all the hours poring through records of the investigation and civil trial. She made copies of the original police reports, trial transcripts, vintage newspaper clippings, and any other documents needed to prove every highlighted point.
“This was the most nerve-racking thing I ever went through,” she said of the prep. “I didn’t want to be another family member telling them how sad I am. I was thinking that this is a veteran detective. They don’t care that I’m sad. They care about facts. I wanted to go in there with facts, lay those facts out, say this is what you have to look into, and have backup evidence of all my facts.”
“I don’t want to get my hopes up. I have to trust the same people that let us down 20 years ago. But I don’t have another choice.”
Menjivar showed up at police headquarters with her mother and uncles, the same group that I’d met with last summer at the Falls Church Community Center. (I had identified myself as a journalist while accompanying Menjivar to meetings at the courthouse and Fair Oaks police station, and Lafay and the officers permitted me to observe. But I did not attend the meeting with Long, who specifically told Menjivar that no media would be allowed.)
For all her fears, the summit went well. Menjivar said Long was nice and attentive, and even admitted being impressed with her preparedness. The cold case detectives don’t work with a shot clock, given that statutes of limitations don’t apply to homicide charges, and Long didn’t give her a timetable on when she might get a thumbs-up or thumbs-down from FCPD on whether they’d kickstart the Cornejo investigation. But before she left, Long asked Menjivar to leave her presentation and supporting documentation with him, which she took as a very positive sign.
Long got in touch with Menjivar at year’s end and asked her if she’d come back to headquarters after the holidays to make the same presentation to a superior in the police department. That got her hopes up even more.
Menjivar got the family back together for the second meeting with cold case officials at police headquarters on Feb. 24. She’d worked up a streamlined version of the speech she gave at the first gathering. But she never got to give it. There were no superiors in the room, only Long and his partner, Detective Wallace.
Long said a lot had changed since their last gathering. He said that he’d found a document in the Cornejo case file that convinced him that moving forward with a murder investigation would be fruitless. Long was talking about the letter Morrogh had written in 2008 when he was pressed by Gardner to look into the case. Long held up a longer version of the letter, about 12 pages, much more than the three-page missive that was released to Defector by Falls Church city officials. But the contents were just as she remembered: lots of discouraging words demonizing the guy who got shot in the back, little or no evidence investigators spent any energy building a case against the shooter.
“As he was talking I was getting such bad anxiety, seeing where it was going, and having flashbacks to the beginning, when no charges were brought at all,” Menjivar told me after the meeting. “It was all the same old things. I was in shock.”
Long would not let her or other family members hold or even look closely at the document he was reading from, Menjivar said. Long was acting as if Morrogh’s assessments were a revelation, she said, though she felt everything he read had been made public previously or was included in Toney’s original report on the investigation. She said Long repeatedly described the document as an “independent” review of the investigation. Morrogh had worked alongside Horan for more than two decades before replacing him as commonwealth’s attorney. And Menjivar was well aware that Toney had testified during the civil case that on June 25, 2005, the day of the shooting, he met with Morrogh to discuss the case, not Horan, because Horan was golfing that day. Toney had also testified that he and Morrogh met again a few days later with Horan to plot who else Toney should interview. Toney’s testimony made Morrogh seem like an architect of the investigation that he defended in his letter to Gardner.
“Real independent, huh?” she said.
Menjivar said Long ended the meeting by saying that if Menjivar found “any new information” about the case to let him know, but for now his unit was done pursuing an investigation. Menjivar said she left police headquarters in tears and disbelief.
“This wasn’t the meeting [Long] asked me to come to,” she said. “I felt so set up.”
Neither Long nor Wallace responded to Defector’s request for comment for this story.
Gardner, the now-former mayor of Falls Church, told Defector recently she was surprised to learn that Morrogh’s 2008 letter to her was still being used as the basis for ending what she called “not-really-a-cold case.” She said that in the aftermath of Cornejo’s killing and the civil trial, she wanted a criminal prosecution of the shooter, and her feelings about Morrogh’s missive and the shooting investigation haven’t changed over time.
“You can’t have your own people investigating your own people,” Gardner said. “The letter is one perspective, made without an in-depth investigation. I don’t think the Fairfax County police did a thorough investigation. They decided on a storyline very early and then just stuck with it. The lead investigator, the questions are about him, because he clearly didn’t do his job. This doesn’t answer those questions.”
Defector filed a public records request with Fairfax County police on February 26, 2026, for the 12-page document Long cited to Cornejo’s family. Additional requests were made in March for transcripts of interviews between Detective Shillingford and Amodeo, one from the crime scene in 2005 and another from 2007 after the civil trial, both of which were referenced by Long while reading from Morrogh’s document. In a March 9 email, Jessica Cox, the manager of FCPD’s FOIA compliance division, denied every request.
Cox gave no specific reason for the rejections, but cited a state law that says release of the documents was up to the discretion of the “custodian” of the records. Cox had identified herself as the legal custodian of FCPD records in a previous rejection of a documents request from Defector. That same state code she referenced, however, also says the custodian cannot reject such requests made by the “victim's immediate family members.”
After learning of Cox’s rejection, Steven Cornejo’s father, Austin Cornejo, formally and politely requested that the county provide him with the 12-page document which Long had read from. Cox’s office asked him for proof of identity, and he immediately sent in a photo of his driver’s license. Austin Cornejo subsequently filed FOIA requests for two other records from the original investigation that had been cited by Long.
Cox then wrote that because he had made multiple requests, the county had tacked on "an additional 60 working days" to its legally mandated five-day deadline to respond to Austin Cornejo’s original request. He then asked the county to not lump all the requests together, and to please just provide him with the letter that Long told him and other family members was the reason the county would never prosecute his son’s killer. He knew Cox already had the requested record in hand from her rejection of Defector’s FOIA.
Cox refused to reduce the 60-day extension she’d granted herself.
"The new deadline for this FOIA request is now June 11, 2026,” Cox said.
“I feel like I have dragged my family back into this with me,” Menjivar told me after the second meeting. “This was my journey and I brought them into it, and I felt so bad to disappoint them. But also, this person who killed someone is still just out there.”
Menjivar is still left wondering, as her family, Cornejo’s loved ones, at least a few civil trial jurors, and lots of strangers who looked into the case have wondered for years, how different Fairfax County law enforcement would have handled this case had the roles been reversed, and a young Salvadoran guy had pulled out an illegally concealed weapon after a night of drinking at TGI Fridays and shot an unarmed white Navy veteran in the back.
As the spate of FOIAs indicates, her crusade to get justice for her cousin continues. That June 11 deadline can’t come fast enough for Menjivar.
“This is my last shot at doing something about this case, and I took that shot, and everything now is out of my control,” she said. “I did everything I could in my lifetime for Steven. Even if it doesn’t work out in our favor, now I can live the rest of my life knowing that.”
