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19-year-old arrested in ‘brutal’ stabbing death of a woman in Great Falls, Virginia police say

(CNN) — Virginia police have arrested a man suspected in the gruesome death of a woman in Great Falls.

Alexis Antonio Cedillos-Campos, 19, was arrested in connection with the homicide of Carmen Lizet Puch, a 42-year-old woman who was found dead Monday in the parking lot of a park, Fairfax County police said.

“Our victim suffered numerous stab wounds in a really brutal, unspeakable way,” Police Chief Kevin Davis said at a Wednesday news conference.

“We have video footage of our suspect at the restaurant where he worked with our victim, arming himself with a fixed blade knife, taking a pair of black latex gloves, taking a water bottle, and then off he goes with the intent to do harm and kill the victim,” the chief said.

Cedillos-Campos is an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement. He was arrested in 2024 by Customs and Border Protection after illegally crossing the border near El Paso, Texas, the agency said.

Police said Cedillos-Campos and Puch were coworkers and also had an “intimate relationship.”

“That relationship was intimate … and there are other aspects of that intimate relationship that involve other people,” Davis said. “And that’s as far as I’ll go with that.”

More details will be released Wednesday afternoon, police said.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

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Mike Lindell says he’ll fund hand recount of Minnesota governor primary ballots

Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder who finished a distant second to Minnesota House Speaker Lisa Demuth in the Aug. 11 Republican primary for governor, announced Wednesday that he will personally pay for a hand recount and audit of every paper ballot cast in that race.Lindell said the effort is grounded in a right Minnesota law affords to candidates to request a full hand count of ballots even outside the narrow margin that triggers a state-funded recount."One of the few good election laws Minnesota does have is that as a candidate, I have the right to completely audit and hand count every ballot in the state," Lindell said in the announcement, adding that he intends to use that right "to the full extent of the law."The move follows a lopsided loss, with the House speaker beating Lindell by roughly 11 percentage points. That gap is far outside the 0.25% threshold at which Minnesota pays for a recount automatically. A wider margin would mean that any recount would have to be requested and paid for by the candidate.WCCO has reached out to the Secretary of State's office to determine if Lindell's campaign has formally requested a discretionary recount. Minnesota law states that "an apparent losing candidate must submit a request for a discretionary recount along with the funds to cover the cost of the recount within five days of the canvass of a primary election."There have been no official findings of fraud or irregularity in the results. Nonetheless, on primary night, Lindell told reporters he would not concede until every vote was counted and that his team had spotted "anomalies" it needed time to review, though he offered no evidence at the time.Lindell became a national figure after the 2020 election by promoting unproven claims that voting-machine companies had manipulated results for President Trump. Those claims led to costly legal fallout: Lindell settled a defamation suit with Dominion Voting Systems last month, and a judge separately found he had defamed Smartmatic, another voting-technology company, though damages in that case have not yet been determined.Demuth is scheduled to face Sen. Amy Klobuchar in the Nov. 3 general election to succeed retiring Gov. Tim Walz.
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