Police Find 43-Year-Old, Former Federal Prosecutor Dead in Her Alexandria, VA Home

Questions linger about the death of a former federal prosecutor who police say was found dead in her Alexandria, Virginia, home on Saturday morning, according to reports:

Officers with the Alexandria Police Department were dispatched to the home at 9:18 a.m. Eastern Time on a report of an unresponsive woman.
They arrived to find 43-year-old Jessica Aber, former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, dead at the scene, police reported. It was not immediately clear if the home belonged to Aber, or who had contacted police.

Former colleagues of Aber, though, confirm that the home where she was found deceased belonged to her.

BREAKING: Biden-appointed U.S. Attorney Jessica Aber, 43, found deceased this morning by police in Alexandria, Virginia - statement pic.twitter.com/RaGJ8MqcLj
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) March 22, 2025

Nominated to the U.S. Attorney post by former President Joe Biden in Aug. 2021, Jessica Aber resigned in January, at the start of President Trump's second term, to create a vacancy.

One of the people who Aber looked up to was a judge for whom she clerked, U.S. District Judge M. Hannah Lauck, who, in an interview with the Washington Post, remembers her as "brilliant," but also her "sense for justice...[and] her humanity," adding that "my clerk family has lost its rock, and I have lost a friend."

Here's some of Aber's background:

Born in Walnut Creek, California, in 1981, Ms. Aber established herself as a lawyer in Virginia’s capital city, attaining an undergraduate degree from the University of Richmond in 2003 and a law degree from the William & Mary School of Law in 2006.
She was a law clerk for Lauck, who was then a magistrate judge, in Richmond. Ms. Aber was one of the prosecutors who obtained a jury conviction for former Virginia governor Robert F. McDonnell on corruption charges in 2014. The Supreme Court overturned the convictions.
In January, she cited a conviction for Siemens Energy Inc., a U.S. subsidiary of the German conglomerate Siemens Energy AG, last year in a corporate espionage case, among her office’s key accomplishments. The subsidiary pleaded guilty to stealing secrets from competitors General Electric and Mitsubishi, which were bidding along with Siemens on a new power plant proposal in Virginia. Siemens agreed to a $104 million penalty. But more important was the criminal conviction on the company’s record, Ms. Aber said, after years in which prosecutors often used more lenient alternatives for corporate misbehavior, such as deferred-prosecution agreements.

The Washington Post report linked above includes a vignette about her mission to "improve relationships between law enforcement and the people they serve":

In an interview this year with The Washington Post, Ms. Aber said she logged more than 50,000 miles on her Hyundai as she crisscrossed Virginia to meet with students and community groups in an effort to improve relationships between law enforcement and the people they serve. She conceded then that the task was difficult, in an age of widely reported police killings of unarmed Black people, civil unrest and calls to “defund the police.”
Her message: “We follow the facts and the law, trying to do it in an entirely apolitical way.”

She continued in the interview, speaking highly of the important work handled by the nearly 300 attorneys she managed in the Eastern District of Virginia--which includes Northern Virginia, the Hampton Roads, and Richmond areas--and even praised Republicans in the Commonwealth's leadership with whom she collaborated, like AG Jason Miyares:

Her staff, Aber said, deserved credit for securing blockbuster criminal convictions — including for notorious Islamic State militants and MS-13 gang leaders — and record-setting civil settlements for corporate wrongdoing. A Democratic appointee, Aber credited Virginia’s Republican attorney general, Jason Miyares, for collaborating with her office on a task force called Operation Ceasefire that prosecutes firearms offenses in the highest-crime cities, contributing to an overall drop in violent crime rates.

In a statement shared on the Alexandria Police Department's official X account on Saturday, officials stated that they have not released the cause and manner of Jessica Aber's death, since that is the role of the state's Chief Medical Examiner's office: