Talking Dateline: The Shadow in the Window

Transcript

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Speaker 14 Hi, everyone. I'm Andrea Canning and we are talking Dateline.
Today I'm here with Keith Morrison, the legendary Keith Morrison. Hey Keith.

Speaker 4 You're sure. A legend in his own mind only.
Yeah. Right.

Speaker 14 I knew you'd laugh.

Speaker 14 All right. This powerful episode is called The Shadow in the Window.
If you haven't seen it, it's the episode right below this one on your Dateline podcast feed.

Speaker 14 So go there and listen to it or stream it on Peacock and then come back here.

Speaker 14 For this talking dateline, Keith has an extra clip that didn't make it into the show and will also answer some of your questions about the episode from social media.

Speaker 14 To recap, in 2017, 35-year-old Nada Huranier was found dead on the ground outside of her Farmington Hills, Michigan home beneath an open window. Inside the home was a stepladder and cleaning spray.

Speaker 14 Investigators wondered, was it an accidental fall while cleaning or something more sinister? A complex investigation revealed the alarming truth that shook Nada's family and the community.

Speaker 14 Okay, let's talk dateline. Right out of the gate here, Keith, this story,

Speaker 14 I mean, the clues were so abundant. It was like a Hitchcock movie.

Speaker 4 It really was, wasn't it? And then the clincher about who actually did it and how they could prove it

Speaker 4 was something I've never seen before. It was the strangest darn thing there were video cameras all around the house right

Speaker 4 but it was it was black dark outside so the cameras weren't really recording anything with any quality at all but there was just enough light in the courtyard where she fell

Speaker 4 that it caught this flash of a shadow going by at a particular time And you could see it was the beginning of where she was tossed out the window.

Speaker 4 And you could see that she was being being tossed out the window by someone, which told them two things.

Speaker 4 It confirmed the medical examiner's evidence that she had to have been dead before she was thrown out the window.

Speaker 4 And it showed that it was a person who threw her out the window and she didn't go out by herself on her own steam. That shadow had all the impact you can imagine.
Yeah.

Speaker 14 Yeah, I truly felt like I was watching a movie. I don't say that lightly.
That was

Speaker 14 straight out of Hollywood. Yeah,

Speaker 4 it was. It was.

Speaker 4 A lot of the happenings in this story kind of would

Speaker 4 make a good movie. Yeah.

Speaker 14 And Aya was such a complex character.

Speaker 14 You know, now a young woman.

Speaker 4 Aya's a phenomenal young woman. Sure.
She was.

Speaker 14 And you were so good with her. You know, you were gentle, kind, but also she clearly has a wall up.
I mean, she has been greatly affected by this. And

Speaker 14 was sharing with you, but yet

Speaker 14 at the same time, at times detached while sharing these intimate details of her life. And you can see it's like she's doing that on purpose.
She doesn't want you to see what's inside.

Speaker 4 Right.

Speaker 4 She had gates and walls up all around her, and she knew what she wanted to tell me, and she didn't want to tell me any more than that. And I didn't want to be rude, but at the same time,

Speaker 4 you know, it was important to understand what her motivation was, what drove her,

Speaker 4 what her feelings were about all of this. She is still trying to protect herself from the emotional heft of what happened.

Speaker 4 I mean, she and her mother, she and Nada, were very close in a family which was troubled,

Speaker 4 in a family which was bisected between loyalty for the father and loyalty for the mother. And I,

Speaker 4 I think, to this day feels

Speaker 4 a tremendous amount of guilt because

Speaker 4 that night her mother wanted her to sleep with her as they did on occasion. You know, they were just, you know,

Speaker 4 because there was trouble in the house. You know, there had been trouble in the house.
And Aya with her was,

Speaker 4 you know, kind of, I think, safe for both of them or make them both feel safe or better. Right.

Speaker 4 And she didn't that night. And she regrets it to this day.

Speaker 14 But, you know, I was thinking to myself, I'm like, Aya, if it wasn't that night, it would be another night. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 14 So she shouldn't carry that guilt because they wouldn't have, I don't believe that would change the outcome, you know, maybe for one day.

Speaker 4 No.

Speaker 4 And I found it instructive that she elected to go and live in a foster family until she was a recognized adult rather than live with her father.

Speaker 4 She, you know, retains that kind of visceral anger against her dad to this day.

Speaker 14 We heard that visceral anger in the courthouse. Aya was so reserved in the interview, and then you heard her yelling in the courthouse, the audio of her in the hallway.

Speaker 4 But one of the things that was most intriguing to me about this story, they didn't charge the father with

Speaker 4 taking part in this crime or aiding and abetting or being in control of the son who committed it.

Speaker 4 And I think the prosecutor wished he could do that, but he just didn't have the sufficient evidence to be able to do so.

Speaker 4 The dad was far away when the crime occurred, but was in constant contact with the son and had been all along.

Speaker 14 Aaron Powell, yeah, even though the dad was never charged with anything. What was interesting, though, was the whole time I'm thinking, oh, the dad did it.
The husband did it. There's no question.

Speaker 14 And then suddenly it's the son. And I'm thinking, wow, I didn't see that one coming.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 14 When we come back, Keith is going to share a podcast exclusive clip from an interview with Nada's divorce attorney, Robert Zivian.

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Are you doing the same for your brain?

Speaker 13 Acting early to protect brain health may help reduce the risk of dementia from conditions like Alzheimer's disease.

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Speaker 14 One of the weirdest things I think I've ever heard, maybe on a dateline, is when the brother, Aya gets her brother to go out and check on the mom, on Nada, and he says in his police interview that he went to go get her water.

Speaker 14 I mean, I'm thinking to myself, what?

Speaker 14 She's clearly fallen out of a window. And that's what you do? You go get water?

Speaker 4 He probably hadn't thought through it too thoroughly. He was, what, 16 years old.
He was being questioned by some skilled detectives. And he got, you know, he kept changing his story.

Speaker 4 He was befuddled. He didn't plan it in a way that he would ever get away with it.

Speaker 4 But when he had the conversation with detectives, the one his father stopped partway through, he was incriminating himself increasingly as he talked to them because

Speaker 4 he would just tell them all this weird stuff. But then they looked at the video of him doing CPR on his mother and talked to Aya about that too.
And

Speaker 4 he was going through the counting steps of doing CPR, but he wasn't actually doing the CPR because he knew she was dead and had been for a while.

Speaker 14 I actually didn't notice the first time around with the video. I didn't notice that he wasn't properly doing CPR.
And then you pointed it out later in the show. And I thought, oh, yeah.

Speaker 14 And then I started taking a closer look. But at first, I totally believed it.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Well, that was his intent.
He wanted to be believable, but he didn't give a very good performance.

Speaker 14 No, he didn't. He was a bad actor, I would say, all around.

Speaker 14 The other thing that really made me mad was when he brings up his sister, Aya, like he's blaming her almost in the police interview, or at least pointing them in her direction for a moment.

Speaker 4 Yeah,

Speaker 4 he was wriggling, that's for sure.

Speaker 14 This was a very complex family dynamic going on, like more so than most of our date lines, I would say. And our date lines get pretty complex.
This one had another level to it.

Speaker 14 Aaron Powell, it sure did.

Speaker 4 The real hate that both Nada's husband and son began to show toward her was based on family dynamics. It was based on, you know, who's controlling this household and why are you behaving this way?

Speaker 4 Because she was ⁇ you know, it was a ⁇ it was one of those stories where one of the partners

Speaker 4 in the drama

Speaker 4 is launching a new life, is making a new person of herself.

Speaker 14 You know, this episode reminded me of a show that I did about a woman who was overweight and she started doing Zumba and she lost a lot of weight.

Speaker 14 And suddenly she's having a different frame of mind.

Speaker 4 And, you know,

Speaker 14 that meant she lost interest in her husband because he just wanted to sit on the couch and play video games. And now she's working out and making new friends.
And it leads to a breakup.

Speaker 14 And he couldn't handle that. So he killed her.
And I really thought of this as being similar to that, you know, that Nada was finding her way.

Speaker 14 She was breaking free from whatever prison she felt she was in, you know, in her marriage.

Speaker 4 She was.

Speaker 4 You've got it exactly right. She was breaking free from that.

Speaker 14 And it was interesting how everyone was very careful to say that her, you know, hijab coming off, you know, that it wasn't a religious thing. It was a freedom thing for her.

Speaker 14 You know, that now she's working out in the gym and then she's getting a job and she has a new guy. And

Speaker 14 it was a symbol, really, of her new life, that, you know, that coming off.

Speaker 4 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: It was for her.

Speaker 4 And I had some concern that people might see this as a sort of a rejection of Islam or something, the story. Not so at all.

Speaker 4 And,

Speaker 4 you know, she was in a different milieu, a different culture, a different situation. And though she remained,

Speaker 4 up up until her dying day, an absolutely devout Muslim, she adopted a more Americanized kind of life.

Speaker 4 And her husband and son had trouble with that. And I think that's what they focused their anger on.

Speaker 4 But the real anger was not so much that, it appeared to me, but the fact that she was breaking away from the marriage. And neither father nor son could bear that.

Speaker 14 Aaron Ross Powell, you have an extra clip, Keith, that did not make the show with not a divorce attorney.

Speaker 4 Yeah, Bob Zivian.

Speaker 14 Yeah, that goes a little more in depth into the relationship between husband and wife. Let's take a listen to that clip.

Speaker 4 Let's do that.

Speaker 17 I think Nava was looking forward to being independent in terms of her husband

Speaker 17 and

Speaker 17 being in a less traditional setting. I never heard Nava say a bad word about Islam or traditional Muslim garb or behavior or

Speaker 17 traditions, whatever it might be.

Speaker 17 It wasn't that. It was really, it was pretty impressive.

Speaker 2 She was looking forward.

Speaker 17 She was a good client and

Speaker 4 I would say she was a good mother.

Speaker 17 I think Nada

Speaker 4 somewhere is

Speaker 17 looking down.

Speaker 17 on

Speaker 17 Aya and

Speaker 17 cheering her on just for the idea that Aya is going to be a woman who is going to have to be reckoned with. And I think Nada would have really liked that.

Speaker 17 And it's so unfortunate and tragic that Nada is not going to get to see that.

Speaker 14 Yeah,

Speaker 14 you get that because Nada was breaking free herself. And now she has a daughter.
who is so independent and is going to be a lawyer. And yeah, I mean, everything he said just makes complete sense.

Speaker 4 It's just that in this case, the daughter is the one who has to complete the process that the mother began of becoming a fully human being.

Speaker 14 So true.

Speaker 14 Such a shame that Muhammad took that from them. He took that relationship, that mother-daughter relationship, and he took away from Nada the opportunity to see her daughter.

Speaker 14 excel, which is really sad.

Speaker 4 In the end, Muhammad got, what, 35 to 60 years.

Speaker 4 He was only 16 when the crime was committed, so I think you have to assume that he's not going to serve the full 60 years. He'll probably be released closer to the 35, and he'll still be

Speaker 4 in midlife and able to live some kind of life after that.

Speaker 4 But it's still a huge penalty for a young person to pay

Speaker 4 for getting all wrapped up in anger at his mother. Right.

Speaker 4 But you wonder what he's thinking sitting in a jail cell, knowing he's got 30, 35 years ahead of him of that kind of life.

Speaker 4 Will he regret what he did? Will he get dug further

Speaker 4 into the anger and into

Speaker 4 kind of a narrow way of looking at life? I don't know. Prison, as they say, will tend to stop the growth of an individual.

Speaker 4 They kind of come out, no matter how long it is, they come out the same age as when they went in.

Speaker 4 If they went in a teenager, they're apt to have teenage attitudes when they come out, even if they're 40 or 50 years old.

Speaker 4 But some of them, and a few of them we have spoken to, I know you have, I have for sure, spoken to people in prison who have thought deeply about what they did, who have decided to take responsibility and do something about their lives, you know, even if they're not going to get out ever, to try to

Speaker 4 make an accounting of themselves, to see if they can issue an apology that will make any sense to anybody.

Speaker 4 Be a real person about it. What will Mohammed do? I don't know.
Yeah.

Speaker 14 After the break, we're going to answer viewer and listener questions about the show from social media.

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Speaker 14 Okay, so Keith, our first viewer comment is a good one, a very perceptive one. It's from OMG underscore Garcia.

Speaker 14 I'm always baffled how criminals think there isn't a camera watching nowadays. They're everywhere.

Speaker 19 But to get caught by your own.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it is ironic, isn't it? Mind you, a 16-year-old mind who's probably very deeply troubled and upset at that very moment.

Speaker 4 Probably the last thing he's thinking about is a camera watching, especially when it was so dark that night, so incredibly dark. The assumption was the camera wouldn't capture anything.
And

Speaker 4 it almost didn't.

Speaker 14 Okay. Our next question is from Jess Jen.
She had another good observation as well. Well, I don't think she was cleaning the windows with Tilex.

Speaker 4 You know, I think that's

Speaker 4 probably

Speaker 4 a word for word. If you put a bubble over the head of the first detective on the scene, the words inside the bubble would be, well, I don't think she was cleaning the windows with Tilex.

Speaker 4 So very perceptive. Yeah.

Speaker 14 Okay. Linda Addy made the comment, who cleans windows at 6 a.m.? I was wondering the same thing.

Speaker 4 Yep, good comment. Also, one of the things on the minds of the detectives: gets up on a ladder at that hour of the night, not a shred of light outside.

Speaker 14 No. Our dateline viewers, nothing gets past them, does it?

Speaker 4 No.

Speaker 14 Okay, next one is from Mary Grace Donaldson Cipriano at The Real Gracie D. I can't imagine the level of disrespect you must have for a parent to call them dog in your phone.

Speaker 4 Yeah, well, good point. I was shocked at that myself.
It was a kind of a shared disdain that father and son had for Nada.

Speaker 4 And it was, it was pretty awful to see, frankly, that a son would use that word. I can't imagine it.

Speaker 14 Yeah, that one got to me too when I saw that. I mean, that, ugh, that's so terrible.
Okay, the next one, hot flash honey. The most dangerous time is when she tries to leave her husband.

Speaker 14 And we've heard this from so many date lines that we've covered.

Speaker 4 Time and and it is so true.

Speaker 4 Yep. It's a good remark.

Speaker 4 While we're there, just if anybody is in that situation or thinking of being in that situation, it's so important to be sure you have backup, to be sure you have help, to be sure you have a place to go and someone on whom you can rely.

Speaker 4 When violence occurs, it very often occurs in that particular period of time. So something to think about.

Speaker 14 Absolutely. For other people who might be in a dangerous situation like Nada, reach out to the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE,

Speaker 14 1-800-799-7233 or thehotline.org. Lisa J.
Miller, Lisa J. Miller CO.

Speaker 4 Well, we know her.

Speaker 14 She, yes, she, you had Lisa on as a guest on After the Verdict. podcast a few months ago talking about her detective work.

Speaker 4 Well, and she was a key, a key character in a story we did in Colorado.

Speaker 14 Yes. So yeah, that's where that CO comes from.
So Aya has already shown she has the fortitude to do anything she sets her mind to.

Speaker 14 Another well-told story that shows the strength and resilience of those who lose a loved one to violence.

Speaker 4 Good point. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Aya was a very impressive young woman. As I think I told you earlier, she was careful about what she was saying.

Speaker 4 Understandably so. I mean, you're sitting there talking talking to a person you've just met and

Speaker 4 you're being asked to talk about very personal things. You're going to be careful.
She didn't want to reveal all the emotions involved, but you could see they were there.

Speaker 4 And how difficult it was for her to have to navigate that passage.

Speaker 4 And yet she did so with grace and courage, and she's still doing well.

Speaker 14 Yeah. Hats off to Aya.
I feel like she's going to do a lot of good things in her life.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I agree.

Speaker 14 Very impressive young woman. This last comment is from Megan Berry.

Speaker 19 Megan,

Speaker 14 it just so happens, was the jury four person on this case. And so she said that she still thinks about Nada, the victim of the crime, and

Speaker 14 she hopes that the jury brought a sense of justice for her and her loved ones like Aya with their decision. Wow.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Sometimes we try to talk to juries, as you know, and occasionally they decide they'd like to talk to us, but rare that somebody

Speaker 4 would write a response to a program.

Speaker 4 I'm glad she did. I'm glad also that they were able to find their way to what I thought was a very fair and very reasonable and very good decision in this case.

Speaker 14 Yeah, me too. Thank you, Megan, for that.
That's it for Talking Dateline this week.

Speaker 14 Remember, if you have any questions for us about stories or about Dateline, you can reach us 24-7 on social at Dateline NBC.

Speaker 14 Plus, tune in this Friday for the season premiere of Dateline at 9-8 Central.

Speaker 14 I'm bringing you a powerful story about a murder that went unsolved for years and about the victim's family and their fight for justice. Thanks for listening and see you then on NBC.