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00:00A fatal fall from a second-floor window of a Detroit mansion.
00:10I start screaming and I run to my brother's room.
00:13We need an ambulance.
00:14I'll tell the window can she fall.
00:16I don't know.
00:17Not two stories, yeah.
00:18A devoted mom's life cut short.
00:21Basil arrives, sees his estranged wife dead, and he drops in shock.
00:26Was it simply just tragic misfortune?
00:30This was an accidental fall?
00:32Yeah, I'm pretty sure.
00:34The physical examination did find fractures consistent with a fall of this kind.
00:39Or murder.
00:40Somebody was there.
00:41We know that.
00:42It's on the date.
00:43I mean, if you were in the room with her, did you say you were in the room with her?
00:46To my mom's wife, man.
00:47Not a Harania moved here to Michigan from Syria in the Middle East.
01:15Her husband, Basil Altantawi, was a medical doctor and set up a practice here in Metro Detroit.
01:23Nada and Basil had come to the United States from Syria.
01:27They were raising their children in Farmington Hills, which is a very nice suburb of Detroit.
01:32They were devout Muslims.
01:34They were members of a local mosque, and they had three children, their son, Muhammad, and two daughters, including Aya.
01:42My name is Aya Altantawi.
01:46My mom was a very, very kind person.
01:49She put everybody before her, and she loved us.
01:52She loved her kids.
01:53She and I, we had a pretty good relationship.
01:57We bonded over makeup.
01:58She was very, very good at it.
02:01She was very passionate about the gym, about working out, just feeling like the best version of herself.
02:09Such was Nada's love of fitness that she eventually turned her passion into a career,
02:15working as a personal trainer at her local gym in Farmington Hills.
02:19She was becoming more independent.
02:22She was actually living her life for the first time.
02:26She and I would go to the gym.
02:27I would do my session.
02:29She would be working out, or she would be teaching her own clients,
02:31and then we'd work out for a little bit at the end, and then we'd go home.
02:36Nada embraced the sense of freedom and independence that her new career gave her.
02:42But her husband, Basil, wasn't so supportive.
02:46He didn't like it.
02:47He didn't think it was necessary for her to be independent.
02:51He thought that his role for the family was to be the provider,
02:56so there was no need for her to be independent because we all were reliant on him,
03:00and he was there to provide everything we needed.
03:02So he didn't like that.
03:04He wanted, I think, us to be just lost without him.
03:07My dad was very old school in his thinking, to put it nicely.
03:13So my mom wanting to get a job to work at the gym to live her life to him was she's becoming Americanized,
03:20and he didn't want that.
03:22There became turmoil in their marriage based on Nada's desire to become more westernized and Basil's desire to have a traditional wife within their religious practices.
03:36He did say that once she removed the hijab, that she wasn't really a person anymore.
03:43He didn't consider her to be a person.
03:45And that was the part that really disturbed me.
03:47They would have arguments, but at first it was always, don't talk about it around the kids.
03:54Wait until the kids are gone.
03:55But eventually that pretense dropped, and it was just all out in the open, constant yelling and screaming for my dad towards my mom.
04:04He was becoming violent, uncontrollable in his fits of anger, and he wanted to put us in a little box and hide us away and lock the key.
04:13He was a man who was used to being in control, and that included in his tradition being in control of his wife.
04:26And he was losing that control, and it was very upsetting to him.
04:30In early 2016, Basil and Nada's volatile relationship escalated to whole new levels.
04:38Around Valentine's Day, I remember I woke up to hearing them screaming and arguing.
04:44And I opened my door, and I went to the railing to look down to see what was going on.
04:50And my dad was holding my mom's phone, and he was, like, walking around the house trying to get away from her, and, like, he wouldn't give her phone back.
04:59And he went to their bedroom, and he was standing behind the door.
05:03And my mom put her hand in the door to try to pry it open, and my dad slammed it shut on her hand.
05:09Eventually, I called the police, and they arrested him.
05:16They took him to police station.
05:18They put a tether on him, an ankle monitor, so he wasn't allowed to come back to the house under any circumstance.
05:24Basil would eventually be charged with domestic violence.
05:27He would plead no contest, but it would be the beginning of the end of their marriage.
05:32Basil was also issued with a protective order, banning him from the family home.
05:39Shortly after his domestic violence charge, Nada started divorce proceedings while juggling her career alongside parenting three young children as a single mom.
05:50This divorce between Basil and Nada was definitely what I would call a high-conflict divorce.
05:58There was a lot of contention.
06:00I was concerned about Nada's general safety, but there was a court order in place that protected her.
06:08A lot of times, nobody knew what she was going through because she didn't want to talk about her issues.
06:12She wanted to talk about what was bothering the people that she loved so that she can try to help them.
06:17Most of the time, we didn't know the details of what she was going through.
06:24Approximately 18 months after the incident between Basil and Nada, on the morning of Monday, August 21, 2017, 14-year-old Aya was preparing for her usual school day.
06:39It was the second week of my sophomore year of high school.
06:42I was excited, but that day, I woke up late.
06:47Normally, my mom would already be awake.
06:49She would have had her coffee or whatever.
06:53I think I remember hearing my brother's shower on, but nobody else was awake in the house.
06:59So I thought, okay, let me get ready, and then I'll see where everybody else is at.
07:04I finished getting ready, and I sat on my bed, and I was like, okay, this is really strange.
07:07It's like 6.15-ish.
07:09Nobody else seems to be awake.
07:11We're going to be late.
07:12So I called my mom or didn't get a response.
07:14So I was like, okay, I'm going to go find her and see what's going on.
07:20I went to the guest bedroom.
07:22That was where she would do her makeup every morning.
07:24The window was open, and I thought, maybe just in case, let me go look out there.
07:31The guest bedroom was towards the back of the house.
07:34It was two floors up and looked out over a concrete patio, which was 22 feet down.
07:39Inside that guest bedroom, a stepladder, a bottle of cleaning solution on top of it, next to it, a bucket of water, all right next to that open window.
07:50When Aya looked out the window, two floors below, she saw the lifeless body of her mother, Nada, on the patio, face up, still dressed in her pajamas.
08:02I start screaming, and I run to my brother's room.
08:05I open his door, and I said, our mom's outside, our mom's outside.
08:13He's like, what?
08:14What are you talking about?
08:15I think he was falling behind me at this point, and I was running out of the garage to go around the house.
08:20And I was telling him, come on, we have to go.
08:24Our mom's outside.
08:26Despite how distressing this was, Aya just seeing her mother, she was able to get her brother to come down to the patio where her mother was.
08:35And she called 911.
08:40911.
08:42What's going on there?
08:44I don't know.
08:45We were in the hospital, so I'm sorry, my mom.
08:48And I was the other one that was opening.
08:49She never opened.
08:50Then she followed.
08:52My mom fell.
08:53My two stories, yes.
08:54Oakland County police officers raced to Nada's home, while a 911 operator stayed on the line with Aya.
09:04Is he breathing?
09:06I'm not a sea breathing.
09:10I'm not going to say, I don't know.
09:12This was an accidental fall?
09:15Yeah, I'm pretty sure.
09:18Aya gave her brother, Mohamed, the phone at this point.
09:20He then started following the dispatcher's instructions to give CPR to his mom.
09:26OK, I'm going to tell you how to do it, OK?
09:29One, two, three, four.
09:32One, two, three, four.
09:34Just pick up the pace.
09:36One, two, three, four.
09:38One, two, three, four.
09:41One, two, three, four.
09:42Keep going.
09:42You're doing good.
09:43One, two, three, four.
09:46At around 6.40 a.m., as Mohamed was performing CPR on his mom, the police arrived.
09:54Aya directed the officers as they arrived, while the 911 operators probed Mohamed on what had happened.
10:02So what happened to your mom there?
10:05Look, right, she fell off the building.
10:07How did she fall?
10:09I didn't go to their room.
10:11I just screamed.
10:13I couldn't look.
10:14Do you know where the house she fell or what she was doing?
10:18Yeah, she was on the soft floor.
10:20She was washing her, cleaning the windows.
10:22She was cleaning the windows?
10:23Yeah.
10:25Officer Nathan Jordan was the first one to arrive on the scene.
10:29He checked Nada.
10:31She was still warm to the touch, but she would later be declared dead on the scene.
10:36After mother of three, Nada Harania fatally fell from a second-floor window.
10:48Her 14-year-old daughter, Aya, who had found her mother's body, was unaware that she had been pronounced dead at the scene.
10:56When they took her, I was under the impression that she was going to the hospital to be worked on.
11:02And I thought, okay, she's going to be in the ICU.
11:05Obviously, critical condition, but not death.
11:08I thought, we probably wouldn't get any update for a couple hours, but she was still alive.
11:12But no, she was declared dead on the scene.
11:16But I didn't know that until hours later.
11:18Aya's younger sister had been asleep during the whole incident.
11:23So, the only people who were there at the time were Aya and her brother Muhammad.
11:28So, they were both interviewed by police at the scene.
11:36In the guest bedroom, there were streaks on the window, as well as an iPhone left on top of the dresser.
11:45There was no immediate signs of a struggle or forced entry that the police could see.
11:51So, they assumed that this had been a tragic accident.
11:54Whilst Nada had been cleaning the window, she'd fallen.
11:58They were asking us a lot of questions.
12:01They were asking what our mom's normal routine was, if it was normal for her to clean the windows.
12:07I said, no, that's not normal.
12:09Any cleaning that she would do would be like washing leftover dishes from the night before,
12:14but not cleaning the outside of a window.
12:15She would normally hire a company to come do that.
12:18And then they were also asking about my mom's history, if she ever attempted to harm herself.
12:23And I adamantly, immediately said no.
12:27And my brother was like, Aya, you didn't know this, but yeah, she tried to kill herself once.
12:31And I turned to him and I was like, what are you talking about?
12:34No, she didn't.
12:34And he was like, Aya, you didn't know this, but yeah, she tried taking a bunch of pills.
12:39I just didn't think it was true.
12:41I thought there would have been no way I didn't know about it if our mother overdosed.
12:46It didn't make sense.
12:48No matter which way I tried to spin it, there was no plausible explanation.
12:52As Aya and her siblings were all under 18 and alone, emergency services called their estranged father, Basil, to come and look after the children.
13:03Basil arrives and he sees his estranged wife dead on the patio and he drops to his knees in shock.
13:15At this point, Aya still didn't know that her mother was dead.
13:19It was the first time Basil had returned to the family home since the protective order.
13:25His behavior and comments to his daughter, Aya, raised suspicions among investigators.
13:31That day I had gym.
13:33So I was wearing leggings and a shirt and the back of it had an open back cutout.
13:38My dad comes into the house and he's like, Aya, what are you wearing?
13:43You're going to go to hell if you keep dressing like that.
13:45And I'm just thinking, what is wrong with you?
13:47This is the first time you're seeing me in over a year and a half.
13:50And the first thing you're saying to me is, Aya, you're going to go to hell if you keep dressing like that.
13:54Aya's father immediately commenting on her state of dress after Aya has just witnessed this very traumatic experience
14:02and is a child who actually needs consoling, is very telling about his sort of attitude, approach to family
14:09and, I believe, attitude towards women as well.
14:13Still unaware that her mom Nata's fall was fatal, Aya was desperate to find out her condition.
14:21My dad took us to a bunch of different places that day.
14:23I think we were coming back from one of his friend's houses.
14:26We were in the car, my dad driving.
14:28And he was on the phone with his mom, talking in Arabic.
14:33And we were pulling up into our driveway and he said, oh, Nata's dead.
14:39Everybody gets out of the car and I say to my dad, when were you planning on telling me that our mother was dead?
14:45And he turns to me and his face, like, drops.
14:47He starts crying, he turns to me and he's like, Aya, we have to stick together.
14:52We only have each other now.
14:53We have to be there for each other.
14:55And he's hugging me and I just have my arms down at my sides.
14:58I'm not hugging him back.
14:59I didn't trust him.
15:01I didn't feel safe with him.
15:01I didn't want to be around him.
15:05I think it just reinforced that any hope I had for him, changing, becoming empathetic, becoming a father, was gone.
15:19Security and stability are key pillars of any child's upbringing, just needs, basic fundamental needs.
15:30And for Aya, all of that has been ripped away in a matter of hours.
15:34Her mom has passed.
15:35She already has a very complicated relationship with her abusive father.
15:39And so that's really got to put her in such a difficult and emotional position, which is a huge amount to try and comprehend at just 14 years old.
15:50On August 22nd, the morning after Nada had died, the medical examiner carried out an initial autopsy on her body.
15:59She had suffered scrapes and fractures consistent with a fall from height.
16:03But there was no blood found under her body.
16:06She also had a scrape on her head, which had not bled as profusely as would have been expected, and no bleeding on the brain, meaning her heart had stopped pumping before she went out the window.
16:22That means she couldn't have jumped.
16:24She couldn't have accidentally fallen.
16:26She died before she fell on the patio below.
16:33They went back to run further tests, and at the same time, police returned to the house with a search warrant.
16:40There were six security cameras around the outside of the house, and they confiscated the equipment for further review.
16:48Unfortunately, none of the cameras looked directly at the guest bedroom, but there was a bit of footage found that blew the investigation open.
16:56Detectives came across surveillance of the spot where Nada's body was found, and on footage recorded at 5.54 a.m., they saw Nada's body falling to the ground.
17:12But when they looked at it again, they spotted something chilling in the shadow of the second-floor bedroom from where Nada fell.
17:19On the left of the frame, a light appears to come on, followed by a curtain opening in the guest bedroom.
17:28A person with short hair could be seen opening a window before something heavy was dragged over to it and thrown out of the window, just before Nada's body fell to the patio below.
17:41This is not someone who's accidentally fallen to their death, they're on their own.
17:48Someone else is there and is involved.
17:51This fundamentally changed the investigation.
17:55This was now a homicide, not an accident.
17:58They could clearly see somebody had pushed Nada's body out of the window, but whose shadow was it?
18:05The first person who came to mind for many was Nada's estranged husband, Dr. Basel, Alton Tawi.
18:14Basel's history of domestic violence, after slamming a door on Nada's hand, stood out as a red flag for detectives.
18:23The police immediately look at Basel as a suspect, and you can understand why.
18:27In the U.S., it's estimated that up to nearly 50% of all female victims of homicide have been murdered by intimate partners, past or current.
18:38And so combining that with Basel's history of domestic violence and abuse can really highlight why he was a probable contender for police suspicion and why they wanted to ask him some very significant questions.
18:50Investigators were also aware that during divorce proceedings between Basel and Nada, he had become the subject of another criminal investigation.
19:01Basel had found himself in some serious legal trouble after there had been an investigation into his clinic.
19:08Basel was convicted of health care fraud in the state of Michigan.
19:13That was handled by the attorney general of the state of Michigan at the time.
19:17He had to pay a heavy fine and he lost his medical license.
19:20But investigators were shocked to discover that their prime suspect, Basel, had an airtight alibi.
19:29As part of his protective order, Basel wore a GPS tracking ankle monitor that fed his location to authorities 24-7.
19:38Turns out he was 20 miles away when Nada died.
19:42Basel, Ralton Towie, was not the killer.
19:50After detectives spotted a shadowy figure on a surveillance camera pushing the body of 35-year-old mother of three, Nada Hirania, from a second-floor window, investigators began to narrow down their hunt for her killer.
20:05They now knew that her abusive, estranged husband had a rock-solid alibi.
20:12So the investigators now needed to know the whereabouts of the children at the time of the murder and try to work out if somebody had broken in to kill their mom.
20:22The day after Nada was killed, police wanted to interview both Aya and Mohamed, and their dad, Basel, suggested that the best place to do that would be the family home.
20:33Aya went to school, and when Basel went to pick her up, Mohamed was being interviewed by police.
20:39Sat at the family's dining table, detectives quizzed 16-year-old Mohamed about his mom.
20:45Do you and your mom get along well?
20:49Yeah, I mean, we're pretty normal. We've been pretty normal for, like, a while.
20:53Like, the only time I told you this morning, we kind of had issues, you could say, at the beginning of, like, the divorce case, but that's not it.
21:02How long has that been going on?
21:04Near the two years, a year and a half now.
21:07Mohamed's attitude towards his parents' divorce comes up, and he acknowledges that there were some difficult feelings there,
21:14which is understandable and happens, I'm going to say, in pretty much every case of divorce,
21:19where children might find that situation difficult.
21:21So nothing raises initial significant alarm bells.
21:27All right. So, Mike, how often do you talk to your dad?
21:30So, pretty, like, maybe every three, every three, four days.
21:33Three or four days, your dad pretty close?
21:35Yeah.
21:36All right.
21:36Mohamed still seems to have a pretty strong relationship with his father,
21:40and certainly stronger than that that his sisters have with him.
21:43And perhaps that just expresses that this is a very young person who maybe doesn't understand the violence that's occurred between his mother and father,
21:53because clearly that's disrupted the relationship between his father and his sisters, but doesn't seem to have between them.
22:01Would you know if somebody came over to the house last night?
22:04I mean, if somebody came in the house or anything, would you know?
22:07Well, I should, yeah.
22:11I got up around 6 o'clock, then 6.05, I got into the shower.
22:16And then what?
22:18So I took my clothes, get my school stuff ready.
22:21And then around 6.30, that's when my sister yelled.
22:24Police knew that it was only the children who'd been in the house that day.
22:29So they began to question Mohamed about who this figure that they'd seen on the CCTV could be.
22:36Somebody was there.
22:37We know that.
22:37It's on video.
22:40So we know that somebody was there when it happened.
22:42We're trying to find out if it was something done by an accident, which accidents happen all the time.
22:47It doesn't change anything.
22:48Or if it was done on purpose.
22:50That's what we're trying to find out.
22:51I don't want to, like I said, I don't want to say anything about my sister about, I mean, if it comes down to her, then yeah, she was awake before me.
23:06Although Mohamed claimed his sister was awake before him, investigators already knew it couldn't have been her in the guest bedroom.
23:14The investigators had a crucial detail from this footage, that the person had short hair.
23:21So that ruled out Aya.
23:23But you're telling me right now that 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?
23:31No.
23:32Although Mohamed denied being in the guest bedroom with his mother that morning, police continued to press him about his whereabouts.
23:40I mean, if you were in the room with her, did you say you were in the room with her?
23:44I mean, not, I mean, the only thing that I really did, I saw her walking upstairs with some stuff and I just said to go get a spray bottle.
23:58And then I brought her that and I, I just, that's it, I loved.
24:04Mohamed's story has now shifted significantly.
24:07Now this throws into question all of the account that he's made prior, because it's impossible now to know which elements have been fabricated, which elements are based in truth.
24:19It's okay.
24:20Seriously, accidents happen, all right?
24:23We just need to know.
24:26So my mother's wife, man.
24:29Mohamed, I understand that.
24:30I understand that wholeheartedly.
24:32We just need to know why, so we don't look into this further, okay?
24:39What happened?
24:44Under pressure, Mohamed's story really starts to fluctuate quite a bit.
24:48He admits that he was in the room with his mom.
24:51He was helping her out while she was cleaning, holding the ladder for her.
24:54But then when she fell, in shock, he took himself off to the shower.
24:59I, I, I, I looked down and I, I don't want to, I mean, I don't want to do it.
25:05I don't, I didn't know what to do.
25:07I mean, so, like I said, I thought I was, like, dreaming someone to my room immediately and I just wanted to forget about it.
25:13Because I just saw my mom's phone, man.
25:16When you're looking at a police interview, there is a very key difference between someone adding in additional pieces of information and changing information.
25:27And what we're starting to see here is that Mohamed is starting to err on changing information.
25:33And that can be a real red flag for potential deceit.
25:37At this point, Basel arrived home and stopped the interview.
25:42I, I need to not tell me now.
25:44I don't want to go any further.
25:45I have to tell you that to me because when I came back, it blew up my mind.
25:48My daughter asked me, what's going on, Dad?
25:50Why did you let us go back to the house?
25:52So this is actually now, you know, you're investigating a child here.
25:58Following Mohamed's shock confession that he was in the room at the time of his mom's death,
26:03police interviewed the children separately to avoid them communicating or corroborating on one version of events.
26:10Aya used her police interview as an opportunity to explain that she didn't want to live under the care of her abusive father.
26:20When we got to the police station and we were being questioned, that was when I was able to make that very clear that regardless of what happens, I'm not going back home with him.
26:32And, yeah, I chose to go into foster care.
26:37Me and my sister were going to go live with a family relative who I knew had known for the majority of my life and I trusted and I felt safer with them.
26:45So it was a no-brainer for me.
26:47On August 24th, 2017, three days after Nada's fatal push, Aya received an unexpected message on her cell phone.
26:59I got a text from somebody that I had gone to middle school with and he had texted me saying, Aya, I'm so sorry for your loss, but do you think he did it?
27:09And I was like, do I think who did what?
27:11He said, I'm so sorry, you didn't hear, they're charging your brother.
27:14I found out from a middle school classmate that my brother was being charged with the death of my mother.
27:23I was in shock.
27:25It was more like an out-of-body experience where, okay, yeah, I went through this and I'm telling you all about it, but I'm not feeling the emotions that are connected with it.
27:33I'm just, I don't know.
27:36I, I...
27:37On the day this case happened, I went out to the family home, tried to talk to neighbors, but they didn't know this family very well.
27:48The family kept to themselves.
27:50But after a few days of it being in the news, Nada's friends started calling police.
27:55Nada would tell them that Mohammed, her son, blamed her for the trouble in the family and that she would always have her daughters, but she was dead to her son.
28:07Processing the news that her brother had been arrested and charged for the murder of his own mother, Aya reflected on Mohammed's behavior in the lead up to Nada's death.
28:18He was becoming a lot more assertive, a lot more violent.
28:23I think he genuinely thought that now that our dad's out of the house, he has to step up and be the man and put us in our place.
28:34My brother was in contact with my dad a lot.
28:38Just became a little, like, spy, essentially, for my dad because this was during their divorce case.
28:47I had an encounter with Mohammed that led me to believe that Mohammed had taken his father's side in the divorce.
28:58There's actually a blizzard here in Michigan, and I parked my car close to the house.
29:07I met with Nada.
29:09I had not seen Mohammed.
29:10And then when I went to leave, when I went to get into my car, Mohammed was actually standing right behind my car, and he seemed to be recording my license plate.
29:23The only thing I could think of that made sense under the circumstances that he was going to be reporting to his father.
29:29So he was trying to find anything he could to give to my dad to use as leverage, is my guess, in the divorce case.
29:37So it made sense that he did it.
29:39So I still thought, okay, maybe somehow he accidentally did it, or he didn't mean to do it, or I don't know.
29:46I guess I didn't fully believe that it was 100% intentional.
29:50Aya is a young and vulnerable girl in this situation whose entire life has been torn apart in a matter of moments.
29:57And so, of course, she's clinging on to the hope of her brother's innocence, because she's already lost her mother and her father, and now this is her potentially losing her brother, too.
30:10While Mohammed awaited trial for the murder of his own mother, his father, Basil, hired a veteran defense attorney named Michael Sciarno.
30:19One of the first things that Michael did was highlight that the day after Nada died, Mohammed was interviewed by three police officers without his dad or an attorney present.
30:32He could have been coerced by the officers, he hadn't been read his rights, and that whatever he said in that interview couldn't then be admissible in the court case.
30:40The court ruled in their favor, meaning prosecutors were unable to call in Mohammed's kitchen table interview for the trial.
30:51But in November 2017, during a preliminary court hearing, new details of Nada's autopsy report were revealed to the public for the first time.
31:02The key finding, which investigators were already aware of, was that Nada had died by asphyxiation.
31:10She had been smothered to death.
31:15Armed with evidence that Nada had been murdered, investigators continued to build their case and discovered that Mohammed resented his mother for the failure of his parents' marriage and had taken his father's side during the divorce.
31:29In the very beginning of the divorce case, our mother would ask him where he was going when he was going to meet up with our dad, and he wouldn't tell her, but then he would ask us where we were going and expect answers.
31:41Or when she would try to take his phone because he was texting our dad and he wasn't supposed to, he would not let her, and it would turn into its own physical altercation, and he would then take her phone instead.
31:53It was just very bizarre.
31:54Despite her brother's arrest and his murder charge, Aya was still holding on to that hope that he might be innocent.
32:04I lost my dad long before my mom died. I lost my mom. I didn't want to lose my brother, too. I think that's part of the reason why I was not fully accepting that it was 100% intentionally premeditated murder.
32:17There has to be some other explanation. Maybe he did do it, but how do you kill your mother? How do you kill anyone, much less your mother?
32:29After extended legal wranglings over the use of a police interview, Mohammed Altantawi spent years awaiting trial for the murder of his mother, Nada Harania, who had been suffocated before being pushed out of a second floor window.
32:44In March 2022, nearly five years after Nada's death, Mohammed Altantawi's murder trial began.
32:53Mohammed Altantawi would go on trial, charged as an adult with first-degree premeditated murder.
33:00I was not at the trial. I had, at that point, moved jobs and moved back to the prosecutor's office, who was prosecuting Mohammed.
33:14So I had nothing to do with the prosecution of the case by order of the prosecutor.
33:20Although Mohammed Altantawi was only 16 years old when he killed his mom, he was tried as an adult because Michigan state law allows prosecutors to charge juveniles as adults in cases of serious offenses, such as murder.
33:36A case like this is extremely rare, and there's a name for it, matricide, maternal homicide, where a child kills his or her own mother.
33:46The death of a mother at the hands of a child? Almost unheard of.
33:51In opening statements at the trial, prosecutors focused on the motive and also the family dynamics.
33:59Though Mohammed had a hatred for his mother, her growing need for more independence, her new Americanized lifestyle, and the timing.
34:07Nada was set to give a deposition against Mohammed's father.
34:11In the divorce, he wanted to stop that.
34:14Nada came to my office on a Friday before she passed away to prepare for a deposition that was to be held the next week where Basel's attorney would question Nada, and I, in turn, would question Basel.
34:31And I got the impression that she did not think that the deposition was ever going to take place.
34:37Why that is, I don't know.
34:41I was very concerned about it, and I assumed that Nada knew something that I didn't know that was going to happen between the meeting in my office on Friday and the deposition which was scheduled for the next week.
34:56As it turned out, we'll never know because Nada passed away a couple days later.
35:03This case wasn't just about the physical facts of who was where and when.
35:09It was about a family split down the middle and whether hatred between a father, wife, and a son could really cause someone to kill.
35:19The big question for prosecutors was whether they would be able to convince a jury that a son was capable of killing his own mother.
35:28Part of the prosecution's case focused on inconsistencies at the crime scene.
35:34The prosecutor explained to the jury that this was not an accident, that Nada had been suffocated before she fell, and that the scene had been staged.
35:45The ladder next to the window with a cleaning bottle of solution on top of it.
35:49One detective testified that's not a solution that's used to clean windows.
35:55And next to Nada's body on the patio below was a towel, a cloth that had some solution in it.
36:01It may have also been used to suffocate Nada.
36:07Then it was time for the prosecution's key evidence, the surveillance video footage.
36:13Prosecution showed the jury the video evidence, the shadows from the surveillance cameras.
36:20A person with short hair dragging something over to the window, then hoisting it out to the window just moments before Nada's body would hit the ground.
36:31They also pointed out that inside the house were only the three children, and only one had short hair, Mohammed.
36:38At one point in the video, Mohammed could be seen giving his mother CPR, but according to the prosecution, only half-heartedly.
36:50Furthermore, while on the phone to emergency services, he was not giving her chest compressions at all, and was simply counting.
36:58One, two, three, four.
37:01One, two, three, four.
37:04One, two, three, four.
37:06Prosecutors suggested that this was because Mohammed already knew his mother was dead.
37:15Then they highlighted key evidence from Mohammed Alton Tawi's phone.
37:21Prosecutors knew it would be extremely difficult to convince a jury that a 16-year-old son would kill his own mother,
37:28but they had more good circumstantial evidence, including Mohammed's phone records.
37:33In fact, he had his mother in his phone as a contact named Dog.
37:39To call somebody a dog and your own mom, nonetheless, who did nothing to deserve that?
37:46Just, why?
37:48Mohammed saving his mother's name as Dog in his phone is incredibly misogynistic language,
37:55and really implies a hatred, not just towards his mother, but to women.
38:00And I think we can really see a potential influence there from his father's own attitudes and behaviors towards women in his life,
38:09and how that might have impacted then on Mohammed's own opinions and behaviors, too.
38:13The prosecution also used Mohammed's phone to demonstrate motive.
38:20Just weeks before she was killed, Nada texted her son Mohammed to tell him she would have to testify in the divorce case.
38:28She would have to say truthfully about what happened with abuse and misconduct.
38:32Prosecutors argued that Mohammed wanted to protect his father, that this had serious legal and personal implications,
38:41that he wanted to stop Nada from testifying to protect his father.
38:45But there was more strong evidence prosecutors presented to the jury that Mohammed took pictures of the guest room
38:52and that open window and sent them to his father three weeks before Nada was killed.
38:58Also revealed was further evidence from his phone.
39:02In the early morning hours of the day that Nada died, there were phone calls between Mohammed and his father.
39:08He had told police he was asleep before learning of his mother's death.
39:14Even though the trial raised some questions about what Basel knew, about what Mohammed was planning to do to Nada,
39:21Basel Alten Tawi has never been charged with anything in connection to her murder.
39:26Aya testified at the trial about what was going on in their family five years earlier, when she was only 14.
39:34I didn't see it as testifying against my brother.
39:37I was there to testify and tell the truth, and that was it.
39:42One of the things that I addressed in court while testifying was the fact that my brother saw the divorce as being a splitting the family to two sides,
39:50he and our father and the other being my mother and I, and that our agenda was to destroy our father's life,
39:56to take his money, to take his house, to ruin his career, his life, which wasn't the case.
40:03In response to the prosecution, Mohammed Alten Tawi's defense team laid out their arguments in an attempt to introduce reasonable doubt to the jury.
40:12They pointed out that there was no way of proving that the person in the window was Mohammed,
40:18or even the size, age, or sex of the person casting the shadow.
40:23The defense also made the case that Mohammed was skinny,
40:27and there was no way he could overpower his own mother who had been working out in a gym.
40:33The defense attorney argued the timeline was too tight.
40:36Nada's body fell at 5.53 in the morning.
40:39The children woke up at 6.
40:42Not enough time to commit the murder, to clean up the scene, and to hide evidence.
40:48On Monday, March 14, 2022, after deliberating for only two hours,
40:55the jury found Mohammed Alten Tawi guilty of first-degree premeditated murder.
41:02Six months later, at sentencing, Mohammed continued to declare his innocence.
41:07Then came the victim impact statements from Aya and Mohammed Alten Tawi's father, Basil.
41:15He was trying to use everybody else's story to gain sympathy,
41:18and he didn't even talk about how he was sad about our mom.
41:22He didn't talk about our mom at all.
41:24As Basil left the courtroom, Aya followed him to the lobby to confront him.
41:30I got in his face, and I started yelling at him, and I would have gladly punched him if I didn't have six deputies holding me back,
41:39and I wouldn't have regretted it.
41:41I don't think he understands why I felt that way.
41:46I don't think he ever will understand why I felt that way,
41:47because I don't think he's capable of empathizing with anybody.
41:51I don't think he's capable of thinking about how other people could be affected from his actions.
41:58It's sad for me to think about being related to such pathetic people.
42:06Mohammed was sentenced to 35 to 60 years in prison,
42:11with the judge saying he understood the consequences of his actions
42:15and was deserving of such a stiff penalty.
42:19I have not had any contact with my brother since the trial or his sentencing ended.
42:24Have I thought about it?
42:25Yes, and the only reason that I would talk to him, again, not because I want to,
42:29but because she was also his mother,
42:31and I recognize that I am the only person who would be able to offer him the opportunity
42:37for me to go to her grave and have him be on the phone and say whatever he would want to her.
42:42And it doesn't mean that I like him, that I love him, that I support him,
42:46that I want anything to do with him, that I want a relationship with him.
42:49It means absolutely nothing other than I am presenting you with an opportunity
42:52that I don't think anybody else would give you.
42:55Since her mother's death in 2017 and the pain of the trial,
43:01Aya has committed herself to helping other victims of crime find justice for their loved ones.
43:07My career plans are to go to law school, become a criminal prosecutor,
43:15and if somebody's going through something like domestic abuse or whatever the case might be,
43:20and they feel like they can relate to me or my mom or any part of anything that we went through,
43:25I want people to know and see that I might be biased,
43:32but I don't think I turned out too terribly, all things considered,
43:35and your life isn't defined by what happens to you, what people do to you.
43:41Your life is what you want it to be, what you make of it, and that's all that matters.
43:46I remember my mom as somebody who was incredibly selfless and kind and caring,
43:56and she put everybody before her and didn't want anybody to ever worry about what she was going through
44:01and didn't tell almost anybody what she was going through.
44:04And I know she would want everybody that she loved, everybody in her life to be happy
44:10and to not dwell on what happened to her, and it sucks that I don't have her,
44:18but knowing that she can't be hurt anymore, that's enough for me.
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