“Help! My dad shot me”.
The last words 17-year-old Sarah Said uttered during a New Year’s Day 911 call from the back of her father’s taxi in suburban Dallas, Texas.
The recording dates to 2008, just minutes after prosecutors said Yaser Said shot his daughter and her sister, Amina, 18, in a “”honor killing, ”After learning that they have started dating and he can no longer “control them”. It also occurred after the daughters hatched plans to escape from their father two weeks earlier, even successfully moving house before being persuaded to return to Texas after being reported missing.
“I’m dying, I’m dying,” the teenager could be heard crying on January 1, 2008, a call at around 7:30 p.m. was broadcast to jurors in a Dallas County courtroom today. Wednesday.
Minutes later, a passerby discovered the bullet-riddled bodies of Sarah and Amina outside a hotel in the Dallas area and called authorities for help. But Said was not found. It will take authorities more than a decade to locate a man who is on the FBI’s Most Wanted List and is hiding about 40 minutes from the crime scene in Justin, Texas.
Now, more than 14 years after prosecutors say Said lured his family back to town after they ran away and shot his daughters, the 65-year-old is on trial for a crime scene. murder in Dallas County Courthouse. If convicted, he faces life in prison. Lawyers for Said say that the former taxi driver became a suspect only because he was Muslim and that the investigation into the murders had failed. He has pleaded not guilty.
Prosecutors unveiled a strong case on Tuesday, citing 50 witnesses, including Said’s ex-wife and his daughter’s then-boyfriend, claiming evidence that proves the teenagers teenagers were “very scared for their lives” and had fled about a week earlier for their safety.
“This is a case about a man obsessed with possession and control,” prosecutor Lauren Black said in opening statements Tuesday. “He controlled what they did, who they talked to, who they could be friends with, if they were — and who they could date. And he controls everything in his family.”
Black told jurors that Said became “angrier” in the weeks leading up to the murder after feeling out of control with his wife and daughter, who had been dating the men. non-Muslim. It wasn’t until December 2007, when prosecutors accused Said of holding a gun to Amina’s head and threatening to kill her, that the teenagers and their mother began hatching plans to elope just before Christmas.
“In this case, you’ll hear that in the lead up to the murders of Amina Said and Sarah Said, the defendant’s behavior became extremely dangerous,” Black said.
Two weeks before capturing it, the daughters Said and their boyfriends – Edgar Ruiz and Erik Panameno – began organizing an escape plan.
Courteous Justice for Sarah and Amina Facebook Group
Ruiz told the jury on Tuesday that Amina originally planned to run away alone, but he suggested to his girlfriend that she take Sarah and her mother, Patricia Owens, to protect each other. Panameno said in the witness stand on Tuesday that he knew about the plan and that he had to keep his relationship with Sarah a secret because “something bad happened.” [would] happen to me or something bad will happen to her” if Said found out.
Lewisville High School history teacher Renee Hopkins told jurors that on December 21, 2007, she received an email from Amina informing her of her plans to leave and begging her to keep it a secret. Asking Hopkins not to call the police, Amina said that her father had begun arranging a marriage for the teenager and that she was supposed “to get married this year.”
“He will, without any drama or suspicion, kill us,” Amina wrote in an email read in court on Tuesday. “He simply made our lives a nightmare. He was a man, not God.”
Prosecutors said that on Christmas Day, the group went to Oklahoma, where Owens has a family. The next day, Said reported them missing to the Lewisville Police Department – forcing the mother to call an officer to confirm that she was “alive and well” but was terrified of her husband.
Prosecutors said Amina and Sarah would eventually return to the Dallas area on New Year’s Eve, after their mother returned first and convinced them to join her, with the father claiming he had changed. , prosecutors said.
Amina’s aunt Connie Moggio told jurors on Tuesday that she spoke with the teen just hours before she was murdered. After Amina told her Owens had gone back to Said, Moggio testified that she told Amina to go to the police and file a restraining order against her father.
“She said her mother wanted her home and she didn’t. She said she would rather die than go back there,” Moggio said.
Ruiz gave a similar account, telling jurors that Amina’s last words to her were that he would never see her again.
“She knew she was going to die,” he added.
Prosecutors allege that Said ultimately lured his daughters into his taxi, where Amina was in the front passenger seat and Sarah in the back – and Owens was told to “stay at home” when he was. take them around. Authorities believe the two daughters were shot before 7:30 p.m. near the Omni Hotel.
“She was asking for help and she said the name of her killer, her father, Yaser Said,” Black said.
Joel Patton, Said’s defense attorney, said in opening arguments that his client was targeted because of his faith – and that calls to police only indicated that Sarah was in a very traumatic time. What the lawyer did not explain to jurors was how and why Said fled the scene and became a fugitive for 12 years. Said’s son and brother have since been convicted for helping him evade the police.
“It is wrong for governments to generalize to an entire culture, to criminalize an entire culture, to fit their story and fit their goals,” Patton said. “The state wants to convict Yaser of committing Islam in 2008.”
