The Shadow in the Window

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Speaker 11 Tonight, on dateline.

Speaker 12 I look out the window and I see my mom's body on the ground. I remember screaming, but I didn't realize it was coming from me.

Speaker 14 I got a phone call.

Speaker 14 Nada's dead.

Speaker 12 One of the questions was, has your mother ever tried to kill herself?

Speaker 15 We know that somebody was there when it happened.

Speaker 17 The video showed a shadow figure lifting this body up.

Speaker 14 My brain first went to the husband.

Speaker 12 I remember hearing the shower in my brother's room running, which was really strange.

Speaker 18 I don't want to say anything about my sister.

Speaker 18 She was away before me.

Speaker 13 That's all I have to say.

Speaker 17 Somebody killed her, left no evidence, and got away with something.

Speaker 12 I started yelling and screaming.

Speaker 12 No remorse, no empathy for anyone else.

Speaker 12 None of it felt real.

Speaker 10 A dead woman on the ground, an open window above.

Speaker 19 Was it an accident, suicide, or murder?

Speaker 9 I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline.

Speaker 20 Here's Keith Morrison with The Shadow in the Window.

Speaker 5 The sun was barely up when the girl called 911.

Speaker 13 We need an ambulance.

Speaker 21 A police officer turned on his siren and accelerated past the early morning traffic to reach her.

Speaker 3 Then took a left into what seemed like another world.

Speaker 1 All around the narrow road was still, quiet, and green like the color of money. No hint of trouble here.

Speaker 5 And then he spotted the girl.

Speaker 24 That's her running as fast as she can toward the terrible thing at her home.

Speaker 1 The thing she needed him to see.

Speaker 15 Where's she at?

Speaker 5 Her name is Aya Altantawi.

Speaker 27 She is in her 20s now.

Speaker 3 The crime that ended her childhood was years ago.

Speaker 7 But discovering what happened while she was sleeping, That has filled up all those years and forced her to make hard choices about what it means to survive.

Speaker 31 What's it like to sit here and talk about these last few years of your life?

Speaker 12 I don't know. I mean, a lot of it doesn't feel like I'm talking about my life.
It just feels like I'm talking about someone's life.

Speaker 31 I don't know. Like you're looking at from the outside, somebody else.

Speaker 12 Exactly. It's a little strange, but.

Speaker 12 Well,

Speaker 12 you're smiling.

Speaker 33 Behind her smile, there's grief, of course,

Speaker 22 and anger.

Speaker 1 So much anger.

Speaker 25 We'll get to that.

Speaker 31 You want to start with that particular early morning?

Speaker 32 Yeah, we can do that.

Speaker 12 It was my

Speaker 12 first day of my second week of high school.

Speaker 24 August 2017.

Speaker 3 14-year-old Aya had big plans for her sophomore year.

Speaker 12 I wanted to do some sort of makeup. You know, we're back to school.
Everybody is either a little bit tanner or did something different to their hair.

Speaker 12 You know, so for me, it was: let me try to learn how to do my makeup, so let me do a little bit of mascara, a little bit of blush.

Speaker 4 She lived in Farmington Hills, a well-heeled suburb northwest of Detroit, with her mom, Nada, and two siblings, a younger sister and an older brother.

Speaker 33 They had a morning routine that was almost military.

Speaker 36 Alarms at 6 a.m. Mom, Nada, would check that everyone was up in the car by 6:30.

Speaker 12 It was, if you're not on time, you're getting left behind.

Speaker 39 But that morning, Nada did not come to ensure Aya was up, and it was getting late.

Speaker 12 I got up, got myself ready, sat on my bed, and the house was still completely silent, and I was like, okay, this is kind of strange.

Speaker 27 You should know this about the family's home.

Speaker 26 It's a sprawling 10,000 square foot mansion, easy to get lost in.

Speaker 5 But the quiet that morning?

Speaker 22 That wasn't normal.

Speaker 5 So Aya went to look for her mom.

Speaker 37 First, she walked down the hall to her younger sister's room.

Speaker 30 She was still fast asleep.

Speaker 36 There was no sign of her mother.

Speaker 37 She wasn't in the guest bedroom either, or the kitchen downstairs, or the garage.

Speaker 22 And that's when Aya had a horrifying thought.

Speaker 12 And then I was like, okay, well, the window in the guest bedroom was open. I mean, I don't think she would have fallen out, but maybe she did.

Speaker 41 She rushed back upstairs to that open window and she looked down.

Speaker 12 And I remember screaming, but

Speaker 12 it's like in those movies or when you read in the books where it's like the character is like, oh, I screamed, but I didn't realize it was coming from me.

Speaker 43 She was screaming at the sight of her mother lying face up on the patio, still in her pajamas and not moving.

Speaker 44 Aya ran to her older brother Muhammad's room.

Speaker 12 I told him

Speaker 12 mom was outside and I like started running downstairs. He was following me and I called 911.

Speaker 45 What's going on there?

Speaker 13 Um, I don't know.

Speaker 13 We were like for two sounds, find my mom, and I looked at the one next door with opening, it's never open, and she fell.

Speaker 13 My mom and double look two stories.

Speaker 45 Yeah, is she breathing?

Speaker 13 I'm not a deep breathing.

Speaker 13 I don't know.

Speaker 37 Aya handed the phone to her brother so the dispatcher could talk him through CPR.

Speaker 10 100. Okay, two,

Speaker 10 three,

Speaker 10 four,

Speaker 10 five,

Speaker 46 Six.

Speaker 47 Aya ran down the driveway to flag down that police car and then the paramedics and she and Muhammad tried to tell them what they knew.

Speaker 46 So I saw the window was open and it was open that they were cleaning some pack and I mentioned them to clean something for the morning to get so early.

Speaker 7 Sure enough, police photos show a stepladder in the guest bedroom and streaks of cleaning fluid on the window pane.

Speaker 28 And on the ground next to Nada was a wet towel.

Speaker 27 Had she fallen while cleaning the windows?

Speaker 2 Or was it something else?

Speaker 12 One of the questions was, has your mother ever tried to kill herself? Or was she ever suicidal, depressed, that sort of thing? And I immediately was like, no, she hasn't.

Speaker 12 And my brother was like, no, actually, she has.

Speaker 43 Mohammed said their mother had tried to overdose on pills a few years before.

Speaker 21 Aya's head was spinning.

Speaker 23 She knew nothing about this.

Speaker 11 And then suddenly her dad was at the house.

Speaker 38 There he is, falling to his knees at the news.

Speaker 34 The rest of the day was a blur.

Speaker 6 The ambulance left with her mother.

Speaker 37 Calls started coming in from family.

Speaker 12 And then I was also getting calls from people in the community already who were like, is everything okay? Do you need anything with my dad?

Speaker 12 It was all over the place.

Speaker 30 And you were 14.

Speaker 12 I was 14.

Speaker 44 What Aya didn't know yet was that the ambulance wasn't taking her mother to the hospital, but to the office of the medical examiner. because her mother was dead.

Speaker 48 And Aya's journey was just beginning.

Speaker 12 None of it felt real. Like, none of it felt real.

Speaker 35 But it was real.

Speaker 26 Real the way a shadow is real when it exposes what lies behind.

Speaker 11 An open window.

Speaker 26 That was her first clue something was wrong. And then two floors below, her mom lying so still on the patio.
Aya didn't know if she'd fallen out or jumped.

Speaker 36 What she did know, finally, was that her 35-year-old mom was dead.

Speaker 12 My dad was on the phone with his mom, and he was talking in Arabic. He was whispering, and he said, Um, Nada's dead, like she's dead.

Speaker 31 It doesn't matter how old you are when it happens to you, um,

Speaker 31 becoming a motherless child is a difficult passage.

Speaker 31 Yeah,

Speaker 5 Aya felt so alone.

Speaker 38 Her mom's family so far away.

Speaker 44 Nada had been born on the other side of the world in Syria.

Speaker 36 That's where she'd met Aya's dad, Dr.

Speaker 44 Basil Altantawi.

Speaker 33 After they moved to the U.S., he opened an urgent care clinic.

Speaker 2 They were both devout Muslims, steadfast members of their local mosque.

Speaker 12 My mom was a lot more extroverted, loved going to events, that sort of thing. My dad

Speaker 12 had to drag him out of the house to go to an event.

Speaker 34 Her parents separated in 2016 and her dad moved out of the house. So it was Nada who did most of the parenting, usually with that big smile she had.

Speaker 12 I wish we had a lot more time together because the time that we had towards the end wasn't always the best just because I

Speaker 12 I was a teenager. I wanted my privacy.
I was getting to the age where hanging out with your mom isn't cool anymore.

Speaker 31 What was the last thing you ever said to her or she to you?

Speaker 12 It's a sad one.

Speaker 12 My mom asked me to spend the night in her room, and she hadn't done that in years.

Speaker 12 So I was like, No,

Speaker 12 I have school tomorrow. I'm going to go to my room.
And she's like, No, like, come on, just spend the night in my room. She asked me three times, and each time I said no.

Speaker 12 And I remember in my head, I was like, Okay, if she asked me a fourth time, I'll say yeah.

Speaker 12 She didn't ask me a fourth time.

Speaker 31 You wonder sometimes what would have happened had you stayed in her room with her? Yeah.

Speaker 31 Yeah.

Speaker 25 But what did happen?

Speaker 50 As Farmington Hills police investigators began pondering that, they got phone calls from Nada's friends, friends who clearly adored her.

Speaker 14 She would walk into class, happy with a smile on her face.

Speaker 27 Deanie and Susie, who asked that we not use their last names for privacy reasons, knew Nada from their gym, the Franklin Athletic Club.

Speaker 37 They had first met her nearly 10 years before when she joined their Zumba class.

Speaker 52 What was she like?

Speaker 53 Oh, my God.

Speaker 14 Sweet, loving, happy.

Speaker 36 Dini was getting ready for her exercise class when she got word Nada was dead.

Speaker 14 And I was like, what? What do you mean, Nada's dead? I mean, I was crying for weeks and weeks after this happened because she was such a sweetheart.

Speaker 51 The morning after Nada's death, Chief Medical Examiner Dr.

Speaker 36 Lubasha Dragovich and his team set out to find some answers. Dr.

Speaker 31 Dragovich assigned one of his doctors to do an initial autopsy.

Speaker 54 The photographs were projected on the screen in the conference room, and our colleague started reporting on the case and said, I believe that she died from those injuries that she sustained.

Speaker 1 In other words, Nada died because she fell or jumped out the window.

Speaker 29 But the longer Dr.

Speaker 30 Dragovich looked at those photos, the more something bothered him.

Speaker 54 There was a deep kind of scrape right above her mid-forehead. And it struck me that this type of injury to the scalp,

Speaker 54 I would expect to bleed pretty heavily,

Speaker 54 but there was no blood there.

Speaker 48 No bleeding on her brain either, or from scrapes on her elbow and leg,

Speaker 48 which could mean only one thing.

Speaker 6 Nada's heart must have stopped pumping before she went out the window.

Speaker 51 She didn't jump or die from an accidental fall.

Speaker 11 She was already dead by then.

Speaker 51 The enigma here was actually

Speaker 55 how she came to her death.

Speaker 51 So back to the lab he went to run more tests.

Speaker 38 And back went the detectives to Nada's house.

Speaker 49 They didn't find any signs of struggle there, but a tipster had told them something.

Speaker 35 The house had six security cameras, and Nada kept them rolling at all times.

Speaker 39 The investigators began scrolling through hours and hours of footage, looking for

Speaker 1 whatever, maybe nothing.

Speaker 7 But they did see something,

Speaker 7 something very strange,

Speaker 49 and it changed everything.

Speaker 54 I said, God, this cannot be.

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Speaker 25 They could only hope, of course, to detectives that they'd see something helpful on the security video.

Speaker 2 There were six cameras, after all, hours and hours of flickering footage from the house where Nada died.

Speaker 36 But not one of them was focused on the guest bedroom.

Speaker 5 Except, look at this.

Speaker 29 There was a camera pointed down toward the patio, and just before 5:55 a.m., Nada's body suddenly grotesquely fell through the frame.

Speaker 6 Detectives watched the video again and this time they noticed something else on the left side of the screen.

Speaker 8 A light in the guest bedroom had created shadows on the grass outside.

Speaker 1 A grisly shadow play of what looked like a person moving at the window, lifting something.

Speaker 31 What was your sort of reaction in the moment?

Speaker 31 What'd you think?

Speaker 54 I said, God, this cannot be.

Speaker 54 You see the lifeless body being disposed over the windowsill with some

Speaker 10 push propelling over.

Speaker 48 Somebody seemed to be struggling to get that over the edge of the window.

Speaker 54 Well, obviously, because that body is dead weight.

Speaker 8 But who cast that shadow?

Speaker 34 Who shoved Nada out the window?

Speaker 5 Nada's friends said it was obvious to them.

Speaker 14 My brain first went to the husband. I mean,

Speaker 19 I knew, yeah, we all did.

Speaker 36 Nada's soon-to-be ex-husband, Dr.

Speaker 22 Basil Altantawe.

Speaker 22 But hang on a minute.

Speaker 38 Hadn't he fallen to his knees when police told him about Nada's death, overcome by grief?

Speaker 35 Maybe.

Speaker 34 But what was also true, Aya's parents were in the grip of a bitter divorce.

Speaker 43 Nada had been so young when they got married, 11 years younger than Basil.

Speaker 35 But as the kids got older, said Aya, her mom chafed against her father's control.

Speaker 12 She wasn't really being submissive anymore. She wasn't being like, yeah, like I'll do whatever you want.

Speaker 35 Nada wanted her freedom, Aya told us, starting with a job.

Speaker 12 She's like, I'm going to be a personal trainer. This is what I want to do.

Speaker 55 He absolutely lost it.

Speaker 31 Why would he lose it over that?

Speaker 12 Because she's getting a job. Because she's getting a job at a place where men and women worked together.

Speaker 24 Bickering turned into physical fights, said Aya.

Speaker 38 On Valentine's Day, 18 months before her mom died, Aya was woken up by her parents yelling.

Speaker 27 She went to see what was going on.

Speaker 34 Basil had grabbed Nada's phone.

Speaker 12 My dad, at this point, he's

Speaker 12 in his room trying to close the door, and my mom's outside of the room, and her hand was between the crack of the door and the wall, and my dad slammed the door and closed on her hand.

Speaker 12 Yeah, really painful.

Speaker 2 Aya called the police, and her dad was arrested on a domestic violence charge. He later pleaded no contest.

Speaker 34 A judge put him on probation and ordered him to keep away from Nada.

Speaker 36 And she filed for divorce, took that job as a fitness instructor, and consulted this man, Dr.

Speaker 26 Khaled Abu El-Fadl, a law professor and Islamic scholar.

Speaker 53 The question was, you know, I've been wearing the hijab

Speaker 20 for

Speaker 53 many years.

Speaker 53 I've been covering my hair as a Muslim woman, and I am wondering whether it's a sin to take off the veil.

Speaker 29 The professor's counsel?

Speaker 23 She wouldn't be a bad Muslim either way.

Speaker 53 I don't know of too many Muslims who believe that not covering your hair is equal to apostasy.

Speaker 53 That's just a very extreme position.

Speaker 36 Nada decided to stop covering her hair.

Speaker 1 Basil didn't like it one bit.

Speaker 30 Was she afraid of her situation? Did she express that fear to you?

Speaker 53 She definitely described her family life as oppressive,

Speaker 53 but she didn't say anything that gave me the sense that she would be putting her life at risk if she decides to take off the veil.

Speaker 6 And the divorce dragged on.

Speaker 36 Nada started seeing another trainer at the gym.

Speaker 5 And Basil.

Speaker 8 had other troubles.

Speaker 36 A criminal investigation into his urgent care clinic.

Speaker 1 He ended up pleading guilty to felony health insurance fraud, paid a hefty fine, lost his medical license.

Speaker 1 When he showed up the morning of her mother's murder, it was the first time Aya had seen him in more than a year.

Speaker 12 The first thing he says to me is, Aya, what are you wearing? You're going to go to hell if you keep dressing like that.

Speaker 36 That night, Basil stayed with the kids at the house. Aya said she locked herself in her bedroom.

Speaker 1 got up the next morning and went to school to get away from him.

Speaker 31 How did you deal with being in school? How'd you concentrate on everything?

Speaker 32 Oh, I didn't.

Speaker 12 I sat in my guidance counselor's office the whole day.

Speaker 31 What were you afraid he would do to you?

Speaker 12 Hurt me physically. I mean, I'd seen what he'd done to my mom.

Speaker 6 So, was the shadowy presence throwing Nada out the window Aya's dad?

Speaker 48 It must have been.

Speaker 5 Except,

Speaker 48 it couldn't have been.

Speaker 48 There's a place Aya can go to feel a moment of peace and calm.

Speaker 36 Something she loved to do as a child.

Speaker 12 When I'm horse riding, I don't think about anything else besides me and the horse. It's therapeutic to me.

Speaker 7 Here is where the chaos stops. The memories, the questions.
Aya had so many of those.

Speaker 28 Mostly about her father and whether he could possibly be her mother's killer.

Speaker 24 Suffice to say, there was an awful lot of rage in that relationship.

Speaker 45 Yeah.

Speaker 22 Well, no.

Speaker 22 Aya's dad had an ironclad alibi.

Speaker 11 While on probation for that domestic violence charge, Basil had to wear a tracking device, which showed he was miles away.

Speaker 25 There was no way he could have been the shadow in the window.

Speaker 5 Which meant, what?

Speaker 18 Sorry, what you're going to get, sir?

Speaker 34 The day after the murder, Aya's brother, 16-year-old Muhammad, sat with detectives at the dining room table.

Speaker 6 Basil had run an errand, but asked his son to help detectives figure things out.

Speaker 18 Would you know if somebody came over to the house last night?

Speaker 18 I mean, would there be like a door chime or anything like that? Yeah, the thing is, on Sunday, I had pretty bad ear infections, so I couldn't really hear from one ear.

Speaker 55 Mohammed said the first time he knew something was wrong was when he heard his sister yelling at his bedroom door.

Speaker 18 So then we run across or all the way around the house, and then I didn't really know what to do from there.

Speaker 18 So I went back inside, brought some water for her, went back outside, and then that's when the operator was telling me to the CPR.

Speaker 35 Detectives told Mohammed they were puzzling over something. That security camera video showing someone had been in the room with Nada.

Speaker 35 As far as anyone knew, Mohammed and his two sisters were the only other people in the house.

Speaker 18 Somebody was there. I know that.
It's on video.

Speaker 18 So we know that somebody was there when it happened. I don't want to say anything about my sister Ipa.

Speaker 18 I mean, if it comes down to it, then yeah, she was awake before me. That's all I have to say.

Speaker 35 But Aya had long hair.

Speaker 37 Investigators thought the person in the video had short hair.

Speaker 35 Hair like Muhammad.

Speaker 18 You tell me right now that you you weren't in the room like maybe helping her clean the windows or holding the ladder or anything like that when this happened, when this accident happened.

Speaker 37 Muhammad told his story again, but the detectives didn't seem satisfied.

Speaker 18 I mean, now's the time if we're gonna, if we're gonna be honest about it, we gotta be honest about it now.

Speaker 31 And gradually, his story started to change.

Speaker 48 He said he did see his mom that morning after all.

Speaker 18 I saw her walking upstairs with some stuff, and she decided to go get a spray bottle. and then i brought her that and i

Speaker 18 i just that's it i left there's gotta be more i can tell by the way just it's you're gonna feel a lot better so we can get this explained up as an accident is that what happened it's my mom's life

Speaker 18 just tell us you've gone this far bud

Speaker 51 finally muhammad told investigators Yes, he'd been in the room.

Speaker 36 That he'd held the ladder for his mom so she could clean the windows, and she slipped. And he tried to grab her foot, but it was too late.

Speaker 18 I looked down. I don't want to.

Speaker 18 I mean, I don't want to do it.

Speaker 18 I was like a dreaming song to my room immediately. I just wanted to forget about it.
Because I just saw my mom fall, man.

Speaker 51 Except, remember, the medical examiner said there was no accidental fall. Nada was dead before she went out the window.

Speaker 22 But before the detectives could ask Muhammad about that, Basil walked in and stopped the interview.

Speaker 18 I need to not tell me now. I don't want to go any further.

Speaker 18 You know, you're not investigating a child.

Speaker 36 That's when detectives took them all to the police station.

Speaker 34 Aya and her sister in one car, Muhammad in another car.

Speaker 31 Did that mean anything to you?

Speaker 12 I thought it was just routine. They had questions and you didn't answer it down at the station kind of thing.

Speaker 1 But there was nothing routine about this.

Speaker 37 Aya didn't know it, but some of her mom's friends friends had been talking to the police about Muhammad.

Speaker 57 She said that Muhammad felt that everything that went wrong in the family, everything was all because of her.

Speaker 14 Blaming her. And the more Americanized she became, the worse it got.
Yeah.

Speaker 43 And Susie remembered something Nada said the last time they saw each other.

Speaker 57 I will always have my daughters. But to my son, I'm dead.

Speaker 24 I have found out what happened next, not from police, but in a text from a school friend.

Speaker 12 And they're like, do you believe your brother actually did it? And I was like, what do you mean? Do I believe my brother did it? And they're like, oh my God, like, I'm so sorry.

Speaker 12 You didn't see the news. Like, they're charging your brother.

Speaker 44 Muhammad had been arrested for the murder of their mother.

Speaker 50 It's like, oh, okay. Wait a minute.
You didn't just go, oh, okay.

Speaker 55 Yeah.

Speaker 12 In my head, I did. I was like, oh, I mean,

Speaker 12 it's out of my control. What am I supposed to do about it?

Speaker 31 How could a 14-year-old absorb such a thing?

Speaker 42 Muhammad, the first person she'd run to for help that morning, her own brother?

Speaker 35 Could he really be their mother's killer?

Speaker 48 She didn't want to believe it.

Speaker 37 Couldn't even think it.

Speaker 31 All she knew was she had to survive. So she made a decision to toughen up.
It's a very charming wall that you'd build around yourself, but it's impregnable.

Speaker 16 I can see that.

Speaker 31 Unless you want it to open up.

Speaker 2 Exactly. It would be years before that happened.

Speaker 27 And years before a jury would get a look at the shadowy figure in that video.

Speaker 7 What would they see?

Speaker 17 You can't make out the sex, the size, the age of anyone in a shadow.

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Speaker 2 Mohammed Altan Tawi, just 16 years old, arrested for the murder of his own mother.

Speaker 14 It just didn't compute in my brain that a child could kill his mother.

Speaker 53 We were all horrified.

Speaker 57 We were absolutely horrified.

Speaker 41 Mohamed's dad hired veteran attorney Michael Sciano to defend Hassan.

Speaker 17 I don't believe Mohammed did this.

Speaker 27 He thought the cops had a bunch of shadows, and that was about it.

Speaker 17 That's a shadow being reflected off the house onto this left side of the screen here. You can't make out the sex, the size, the age of anyone in a shadow.

Speaker 29 Anyway, look at the kid, said Shiana.

Speaker 17 He was, I would say, a very skinny, I would almost call him frail at the time, 16-year-old.

Speaker 11 Too weak to overpower his mother.

Speaker 42 He'd been injured in a car accident a couple years previous, fractured vertebrae, smashed breastbone, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 38 Besides, the timeline was too tight, not enough time to commit a murder and hide any evidence.

Speaker 17 Remember, the kids were supposed to get up to go to school at 6 o'clock. This woman went out the window at 5.55.

Speaker 17 Having this whole house cleaned up all within a five-minute period of time, a 15 or 16-year-old boy being able to accomplish that, that's pretty hard.

Speaker 4 Anybody being able to accomplish that and get out of the house and get out of the property.

Speaker 10 Correct.

Speaker 21 I mean, how? Correct.

Speaker 28 But it was Muhammad's interview at the dining room table that the defense attorneys really took issue with.

Speaker 18 You're going to feel a lot better so we can get this explained out if it's an accident.

Speaker 1 This, said Chiano, had all the hallmarks of a false confession.

Speaker 17 I mean you have three officers surrounding him at a table.

Speaker 18 You weren't in the room, like maybe helping her clean the windows or holding the ladder or anything like that.

Speaker 17 When you feed someone that young a story like that, they're going to appease the older person.

Speaker 36 Chiano was determined that no jury should ever hear that interview.

Speaker 34 So, before the trial even began, he appealed it all the way to the Michigan Supreme Court until finally the prosecutors agreed not to use it as evidence.

Speaker 22 It was a huge win, but it took years.

Speaker 36 Years that were very hard on Aya.

Speaker 12 Every year or so, it would be like, oh, the trial's starting on this date. And then we'd reach that date and they'd be like, oh, actually, it got pushed another year or something.

Speaker 12 So then I'd have to wait even longer to know how did she die, who was involved.

Speaker 39 Aya's life had been transformed.

Speaker 38 No more big house in Farmington Hills.

Speaker 30 She chose to go into foster care rather than live with her dad.

Speaker 12 He was like, Aya, if you come live with me, like I'll buy you horses. And I was like, okay, I'm not doing that.

Speaker 43 Aya still suspected that her dad was involved in the murder somehow.

Speaker 33 And she clung to the hope that maybe

Speaker 2 her brother was innocent.

Speaker 12 I just want to continue to give him the benefit of the doubt because if I believed that he did it, then that would have meant that I lost my mom, I lost my brother, I lost my dad.

Speaker 37 The trial finally began in March 2022, five years after Nada's murder.

Speaker 36 Lead detective Richard Webby told the jury the crime scene had been staged.

Speaker 15 I saw the Tilex there, and I thought that that was very odd. I've never seen or heard of anybody cleaning windows with Tilex.

Speaker 37 Then it was time for the centerpiece of the prosecution's case, that security video.

Speaker 15 It appears to be a head covered in shorter hair. The witnesses at the time advised that the only male in the house, the only person with short hair, was the defendant.

Speaker 36 And there was more on that security tape to consider.

Speaker 28 Muhammad giving his mother CPR.

Speaker 15 He was very half-hearted. At some point during the time, where he's still counting out loud to the dispatcher, the defendant stopped giving CPR altogether.

Speaker 24 He was just counting. One, two, three, four, one.

Speaker 26 Fake CPR.

Speaker 34 Mohammed knew there was no point because he had killed her, the prosecutor said.

Speaker 51 The medical examiner said he figured out how.

Speaker 54 The findings in the lungs were characteristic of naso-oral blockage.

Speaker 36 Somebody putting a pillow over the face or a cloth or

Speaker 45 suffocation.

Speaker 54 You can think of various things.

Speaker 6 Including that wet towel police saw and smelled beside Nada's body.

Speaker 54 Evidence texts reported as

Speaker 54 smelling like naphthalene or something to that nature.

Speaker 37 Some kind of chemical.

Speaker 54 Some kind of chemical.

Speaker 11 A chemical that maybe knocked Nada out cold.

Speaker 37 But would a jury really believe that a son could do such a thing to his own mother?

Speaker 36 Well, look at his phone, the prosecutor said.

Speaker 61 His contact name for Nada was dog.

Speaker 61 That was his name for his mom in his context.

Speaker 34 That phone said the prosecutor also revealed motive.

Speaker 36 On it was a text Nada sent her son a few weeks before her death.

Speaker 11 It was about the divorce.

Speaker 51 Nada was set to give a deposition any day.

Speaker 35 She warned Muhammad, her lawyer, was asking about, quote, Criminal things that will send your dad to prison if I said anything.

Speaker 36 The prosecutor said it was clear.

Speaker 35 Muhammad killed his mom to protect his dad.

Speaker 61 His whole goal was to prevent that deposition from happening on the 23rd, and that's exactly what he did.

Speaker 34 There was one more thing police found on Muhammad's phone, and it was perhaps the most suspicious piece of evidence in the entire case.

Speaker 50 Pictures, he'd snapped, just a few weeks before the murder.

Speaker 16 They were photographs. of the same window from which her body was dropped out of on August 21st.

Speaker 35 Proof, prosecutor said, that Muhammad had been plotting the murder for weeks.

Speaker 37 Aya heard none of this because she was a witness in the case, about to see her brother for the first time in years.

Speaker 2 And yet it wasn't him, it would be her father who sent her carefully constructed protective walls crashing down.

Speaker 26 To wait for her brother's trial that seemed endless, something to endure.

Speaker 12 I mean, I would definitely have moments where I'd be really upset with everything, but for the most part, I was just, I was numb to it because I knew if I let my grief take over, then I like I just wouldn't be able to function.

Speaker 31 Why is it that I get the feeling? I've had the feeling the entire time we've been talking. that one poked too many through that protective layer of yours and there's a pretty wounded soul inside.

Speaker 12 Because at the end of the day, I'm still human. There's only so much I can take.

Speaker 22 With Muhammad in jail awaiting his trial, Aya hadn't seen him or spoken to him.

Speaker 31 She hoped still that he was innocent.

Speaker 36 But she told the prosecutor she'd testify about what she knew, about what she had seen.

Speaker 62 When the divorce case started, he was very

Speaker 62 against it because he kind of saw it as my mother was trying to take my father's money, my father's house, destroy our family, rip our family apart.

Speaker 61 When your brother addressed your mother, did you tell what kind of a tunnel he was using toward her?

Speaker 62 Very aggressive.

Speaker 34 Then just a week before the murder, I had testified.

Speaker 37 Nada told Muhammad he could move in with his dad.

Speaker 62 And my brother basically just responded, it doesn't matter.

Speaker 62 You

Speaker 62 already did this. Like, you're going to get what's coming to you.

Speaker 6 Such a throwaway remark.

Speaker 26 And yet, the prosecutor argued, here was more proof Muhammad had planned to kill his mother.

Speaker 21 Give her what was coming.

Speaker 48 Not so fast, said Muhammad's defense attorney.

Speaker 17 There's not one report of that in any police report.

Speaker 34 So Muhammad said this to his mother. Right.
So you thought she made it up?

Speaker 17 Absolutely, 100%.

Speaker 2 On cross-examination, the attorney confronted Aya with her statements to police all those years ago,

Speaker 37 which painted a very different picture of her brother.

Speaker 35 A time Muhammad rushed to help his mother when she was choking on some food. Hardly the behavior of a son who wanted to kill his mother, said the defense.

Speaker 2 And he was the one that came to her assistance at that time, right?

Speaker 55 That's what you told the police, at least.

Speaker 62 That's what I told the police then, yes. I don't remember the exact details of the event.

Speaker 25 And then came the crux of the defense case the complete lack of evidence connecting muhammad to the crime the defense argued he couldn't be identified in the security camera video and the footage of him doing cpr that proved nothing if he's going to just be faking it why not just sit there one two three four one two three four one two three four no you see him actually pushing down but would you agree that he was a little a little too calm a little you know not quite frantic enough for what he was i think if you listen to his voice, it sounds very frantic.

Speaker 37 As for motive, the prosecution alleged Muhammad killed his mom to stop her spilling the beans on his dad at that upcoming divorce deposition.

Speaker 49 But read the whole text, said the defense attorney.

Speaker 23 Nada had gone on to write, I did not open my mouth.

Speaker 41 I'm not going to say anything. I'm not going to say anything whatsoever.

Speaker 23 What's more, If you looked at the crime scene photos, you could see Muhammad's bags packed up and ready to go.

Speaker 17 The bottom line was,

Speaker 17 where was the animosity at that point?

Speaker 47 The defense attorney asked why police hadn't tried harder to find other possible suspects.

Speaker 41 It was not anything other than a casual relationship.

Speaker 2 Nada had been seeing a co-worker from the gym who testified he snuck into the house more than once when the kids were sleeping.

Speaker 36 Well, so too could a potential killer.

Speaker 23 said the defense.

Speaker 37 Equally preposterous, according to the defense, was the prosecution's theory of the crime.

Speaker 22 Lab tests found no chemical on the towel, so how could Muhammad have overpowered his mom, let alone hurled her body out of a window?

Speaker 31 What would you say to the defense lawyer's assertion, strongly, that

Speaker 31 your brother wasn't big enough?

Speaker 24 How could you get her out the window?

Speaker 12 I think when you're very determined to do something,

Speaker 12 little things like that aren't going to stop you.

Speaker 41 Finally, after all the years of waiting, she saw the sum of the evidence against him and was convinced her brother was guilty.

Speaker 36 And after a quick deliberation,

Speaker 62 guilty of first-degree premeditated murder.

Speaker 21 The jury was too.

Speaker 21 Six months later, Muhammad spoke to the court at his sentencing.

Speaker 63 I am innocent. I have never wavered nor will ever waver in that truth.

Speaker 11 Aya listened to her brother.

Speaker 37 And then to her father deliver a victim impact statement which barely mentioned her mother.

Speaker 26 It seemed to be all about defending Muhammad.

Speaker 39 He was a loving, and he's still a loving, caring, supportive human being.

Speaker 12 I mean, that was my breaking point, the sentencing. I absolutely lost it.

Speaker 44 Naya followed her father into the hallway.

Speaker 12 I started yelling at him. You are absolutely not that you didn't.

Speaker 12 Like, his face was here, and my face was here, and I was just pointing my finger in his face. And I had like six, seven deputies holding me back.

Speaker 12 I had just had enough, and all this pent-up anger, they had absolutely no remorse, no

Speaker 12 empathy for anyone else in the situation about themselves.

Speaker 30 I mean, how are you human?

Speaker 31 Is it your belief that your father actually wanted your mother to be killed? Yes.

Speaker 31 That he counseled your brother to kill her? Yeah.

Speaker 31 No way to prove that.

Speaker 23 But when the time came,

Speaker 26 she said it out loud in court.

Speaker 42 She read a family statement that left no doubt what she believed.

Speaker 12 He was the one who pressured his son, the killer. We don't understand how this killer was able to carry out this dreadful scheme that was planned out by his father.

Speaker 1 Others close to Nada suspect Basil may have influenced his son.

Speaker 53 A 16-year-old is still a child.

Speaker 53 And a child who is molded by adults.

Speaker 53 And so who did the molding here?

Speaker 2 Basil Bausol Altin Tawi has never been charged.

Speaker 38 During the divorce he denied trying to turn Muhammad against his mother.

Speaker 36 But evidence introduced at the trial does raise questions about what he might have known and when.

Speaker 37 Right after getting that text from his mom about the deposition, Muhammad sent it to his dad.

Speaker 34 And it was to his dad he sent that photo of the open window.

Speaker 35 Then, on the morning of the murder, before Nada's body was discovered, records show, Muhammad and his dad called or messaged each other more than 20 times.

Speaker 11 We sent multiple requests to Basil, asking him for any comment he may wish to make.

Speaker 2 There has been no response.

Speaker 37 The prosecutor declined our request for an interview, but told us he didn't find enough evidence connecting Basil to the crime to charge him.

Speaker 64 In this case, I find it extremely difficult to have to sentence this young man in what can only be described as a very heinous offense.

Speaker 42 Muhammad was sentenced to 35 to 60 years in prison.

Speaker 37 Aya hasn't spoken to him since.

Speaker 55 She's lost touch with her sister too,

Speaker 55 because her sister lives with her dad.

Speaker 12 If I were to ever reach out to him, it would just be because of my sister. He's dead to me for all I care.
I don't need my dad. I've made a pretty great life for myself, if I do say so myself.

Speaker 31 So what are you going to do with it, this life of yours?

Speaker 12 I'm going to become a lawyer.

Speaker 25 She is determined, this young woman, to leave the past behind.

Speaker 5 She graduated college in three years, and after law school, she hopes one day to help foster kids and vulnerable children, like she once was.

Speaker 12 I want to make an impact in the world.

Speaker 8 Just like her mother did, with her big smile and big heart, Aya wants to make her proud.

Speaker 19 That's all for this edition of Dateline, and check out our Talking Dateline podcast. Keith Morrison and Andrea Canning will go behind the scenes of tonight's episode.

Speaker 19 Available Wednesday in the Dateline feed wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you again next Friday for our two-hour season premiere at 9-8 Central.

Speaker 20 I'm Lester Holt for all of us at NBC News.

Speaker 10 Good night.

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