Killer Dads (34 page)

The case particularly rattled Reckart and Boughey, Reckart revealed at the AHA seminar. “This case affected us like no other. It really got to us. Why did this case have such a profound effect on us? We decided it's about entitlement. This makes you go crazy. He believed he was entitled to this, and that's what made a difference,” she said.

The detective agreed, pointing out that the Maricopa County town just west of Phoenix is a common bedroom community like countless others where an honor killing was something he never expected to encounter. “This case threw us both,” he said. “This is going on in the US. It happened in Peoria, Arizona, so I'm guessing it's happening in New York City and elsewhere,” he added, offering to help other law enforcement officers dealing with any similar situations. “Contact us. We're not experts, but we hopefully can be a resource,” he added at the conference. “Do we know about everything? No. This is new ground for us as investigators and prosecutors. I think we need to remember that murder is murder. Wrong is wrong. That's what we do,” find the criminals. “That's our job. That is what you entrusted us to do, regardless of where you come from, where you live, what religion you are, what color you are, what preferences you have. You call us, we show up and do our jobs. I think it's important that we do a better job of making it easier for these victims, for these women, to feel comfortable reporting problems.”

The year before the Almaleki case, Texas cab driver and Egyptian immigrant Yaser Abdel Said allegedly shot to death his daughters Amina, 18, and Sarah, 17, because he was furious they had become “too Westernized” and had non-Muslim boyfriends, officials say. Sarah Said, shot nine times, managed to phone the Irving Police Department's 911 call center as she lay mortally wounded. “My dad shot me and my sister,” she said, “I'm dying,” police records show. Said is a fugitive and has made the FBI's “most wanted” list. He's believed to be in Egypt or possibly behind the wheel of a cab in New York City.

Across the border in Montreal, an Afghan father and his wife—along with their son—were found guilty in 2011 of killing their three teenage
daughters and a “co-wife” in what the judge described in court as “cold-blooded, shameful murders” committed because of a “twisted concept of honor.”
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Mohammad Shafia, 58, his wife Tooba Yahya, 42, and their son Hamed, 21, killed the three teenage sisters because they dishonored the family by defying Shafia's strict rules on dress, dating, and using the Internet. Prosecutors said the defendants drowned their victims Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, and Geeti, 13, and Rona Mohammad Amir, 50. They were all found in the family's newly purchased used Nissan, at the bottom of a lock on the Rideau Canal in the summer of 2009. The sisters were all Tooba's biological children, though Shafia's first wife (Rona) had helped raise them as her own. The parents and son were charged with killing the women elsewhere, then placing their bodies in the car and pushing it into the canal. They insisted the Nissan had accidentally plunged into the canal after the eldest daughter, Zainab, took it for a joy ride with her sisters and Rona. Hamed said he watched the accident, although he didn't call police from the scene.

The family had left Afghanistan in 1992 and lived in Pakistan, Australia, and Dubai before settling in Canada in 2007. Shafia, a prosperous businessman, owned commercial property in the Montreal area and ran a business buying used cars in North America and shipping them overseas. He took a second wife because his first wife could not have children. Shafia was a strict disciplinarian, and his son acted in his stead when he was away on business, the jury heard. The months leading up to the deaths were increasingly tense in the Shafia household, according to evidence presented at trial. Zainab, the oldest daughter, was forbidden to attend school for a year because she had a young Pakistani-Canadian boyfriend. She fled, terrified of her father, to a battered woman's shelter, but was eventually sent back home. The prosecution said her dad became livid after finding condoms in Sahar's room along with photos of her wearing short skirts and hugging her Christian boyfriend, a relationship she had kept secret. Both Zainab and Sahar wore fashionable clothes and resisted pressure from their parents and eldest brother to wear the hijab. They also both reported incidents or threats of violence from their father and brother to authorities. Geeti was becoming almost impossible to control, her parents believed, skipping school, failing classes, being sent home for wearing revealing clothes and stealing, while
declaring to teachers that she wanted to be placed in foster care, according to the prosecution.

Wiretaps of Shafia's phone conversations, which were revealed in court, captured him spewing vitriol about his dead daughters, calling them treacherous whores, and invoking the devil to shit on their graves. “There can be no betrayal, no treachery, no violation more than this,” Shafia said on one recording. “Even if they hoist me up onto the gallows . . . nothing is more dear to me than my honor.”

As Judge Robert Maranger of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice sentenced each of them to life in prison without the possibility of parole, he declared: “It's difficult to conceive of a more despicable, more heinous crime. The apparent reason behind these cold-blooded, shameful murders was that the four completely innocent victims offended your completely twisted concept of honor, a notion of honor that is founded upon the domination and control of women, a sick notion of honor that has absolutely no place in any civilized society.”

The murders sparked a debate in the public and in the media about the wisdom of singling out the attacks as honor killings, with some community spokesmen emphasizing that intolerance of violence against women is not just a Canadian value but a universal value, and that Afghans, like any other people, condemn such acts. “Calling the murders ‘honor killings' accomplishes two goals: First, it makes it seem as if femicide is a highly unusual event. Second, it makes it seem as if femicide is confined to specific populations within Canada and specific national cultures or religions in the world at large,” said an editorial in the
Montreal Gazette
.
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“But Canadian statistics prove otherwise. From 2000 to 2009, an average of 58 women a year were killed in this country as a result of spousal violence. In that same period, 67 children and young people aged 12 to 17 were murdered by family members. In contrast, recent estimates tell us that there have been 12 or 13 so-called honor killings in Canada in the last decade. It does not take a genius to see that comparing 12 or 13 against the hundreds of women and children who were victims of familial violence serves only to frame ‘honor killing' as peculiar, when in reality it is part of a larger pattern of violence against women.”

When pediatrician Dr. Kaija Hartiala came to work at her practice in Turku, Finland, one day in 2011, she was looking forward to meeting a new patient scheduled that morning. Something about the face of the young mother, who was bringing in her newborn to be checked out, rang a distant bell, but the doctor didn't waste much time puzzling over it. As she usually did with new patients, Kaija sat down with the mom first to introduce herself and explain some of her background and what kind of care to expect. The pediatrician typically introduces herself as a mom of four children, a former member of the local city council, and a deputy mayor in Turku, and notes that she has spent years working at the main hospital in town. “‘Oh,'” responded the surprised patient, Kaija recently told me over dinner in California, “‘you must know about me in that case. That's where I was bought after my father tried to kill me.'” In fact, Kaija had been working in the emergency room some 20 years earlier when the young mother now before her, then a little girl of nine, was rushed in with a bullet in her brain. Her father, despondent over the family's failing business, had waited until his wife left on an errand, then methodically shot his three children before turning the gun on himself. The older daughter and son died instantly; the third made it to an examining table before Kaija. Two decades later, that same girl, now a young woman, sat before her.

“The bullet's path was quite remarkable,” recalled Hartiala. “It damaged very little.” The girl was treated for brain swelling and was watched carefully, but the bullet, too dangerous to remove, was left where it was. The girl went back home in time to live with her mother, but not for long because of continuing problems at home, she told Kaija as they talked that day. She was
raised instead by an “‘amazing'” aunt, the survivor said. “‘It's just so horrible to think about,'” said the young mom, referring to her dad's murder-suicide. “‘But what can you do? You go on to live your life.'” The encounter triggered very mixed emotions for Hartiala. It was “so tragic and shocking when I saw that girl shot by her father so many years ago, but also amazing to see her so long after sitting in front of me, looking healthy and happy, and with a little baby of her own now,” she told me.

Finland, with a strikingly low crime rate, especially by American standards, has suffered in the past from a disturbing incidence of family annihilations and child homicides by parents. More than 60 percent of all child homicides in a 24-year period from 1970 to 1994 were committed by parents, either by fatal battering, or shooting, drowning, suffocating, burning, stabbing, or intentionally killing their children in car accidents, according to a study on filicides and intrafamilial child homicides in Finland.
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The study found that the victims' greatest risk was the day of their birth, though danger remained particularly high for the first four months of life. Of the 200 homicides by parents over that period, 60 percent were committed by moms, but 71 percent of the 75 murder-suicides were committed by fathers. Most of the murder-suicides involved a firearm. Mothers in 74 percent of the cases reported “mental health distress,” noted the study, while killer dads abused alcohol and/or were violent to other family members in 45 percent of the cases. Psychosis or “psychotic depression” was diagnosed for 51 percent of killer moms, and a personality disorder was diagnosed for 67 percent of killer dads and 4 percent of moms. The years of the study, the homicide rates of children under the age of one were over five times greater in Finland than the rates in Sweden and Italy, which had the lowest rates. The United States and New Zealand had the highest homicide rates for children ages one to four in the same period.

The study recommended that special attention be paid by healthcare providers to new moms suffering from postpartum depression, who typically have very clear symptoms, from insomnia to suicidal thoughts. “Intensive and rapid support is needed, especially in the care of the baby,” noted the study. In addition, “clinicians should pay attention to depressed, anxious and even psychotic parents. . . . Support and treatment should be given without delay
because the crisis in the family may exacerbate within days. Parents with personality disorders and substance abuse need early intervention, even during the pregnancy, in order to be able to attach to the child and learn better skills in reading the child's mind and intentions,” the report urged.

Finland was also losing children to injuries and accidents at home. “At one point, we decided this was something we had to focus on,” recalled Kaija. “In the case of accidents at home, we reached out to families and established educational campaigns to teach parents how better to protect their children, things like locking up household cleaning products. We turned things around,” she told me. (The outreach, of course, wasn't fail-safe. In one case, a conscientious mom thought her kids would benefit from her idea to place a large plant at the bottom of a stairway railing to keep her sons from sliding down, only to have one of her boys impale himself on the plant stake when he shot down the railing, Kaija recalled during our talk. Fortunately, the stake went through his body without damaging any major organs. The mom was mortified; the son recovered.)

Though the nation is still struggling to save more children from accidents and violence, from 1990 to 2010, Finland cut its under-five child mortality rate in half, and its child and adolescent death rates were also slashed by 50 percent, according to a Child Safety Country Profile conducted annually with the Eurozone.
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“I think there's a sense in Finland that we're all in this together, and if we don't fix our problems, no one else will,” said Kaija. “And many people believe they need to put some of their efforts into improving life in our communities. We're also a much smaller nation than US, so I think it's easier for us to decide the kinds of issues we want to focus on, come up with a plan, and institute it. That kind of agreement and unified intention and action, I suspect, is much more difficult in a nation the size of America,” added Kaija, who lived for several years with her family in California.