Under the pretense of taking his two daughters out for dinner, Yaser Said took them to a local park and shot them to death. This would lead to him being on the run for 12 years from police and landing him on the FBI top ten most wanted list. Years of abuse allegations had followed the family, and their mother did her best to cover for her husband.
Sarah and Amina Said
We begin today on New Year’s Day, January 1st, 2008 in Lewisville, Texas. Sisters, 17 year old Sarah and 18 year old Amina Said got into their father, 50 year old Yaser Said’s, taxi to go to dinner. The girl’s mother, 35 year old Patricia “Tissie” Owens, later stated that she had wanted to tag along on the trip, but Yaser had told her that he wanted to talk to the girls alone. Unfortunately, the two girls were not taken to dinner, he drove them both about 20 miles away, to nearby Irving, Texas.
At 7:33 PM, a call was placed to 911 from Sarah’s cellphone.
Sarah yelled out to the operator “Help! My dad shot me, my sister, I’m dying, I’m dying!” The dispatcher says “What’s going on ma’am?” Sarah responds “I’m dying that’s what’s up!” He says “Ok I need to transfer you, I need to get the fire department on the line, okay? Hold on a second.” The dispatcher then stops talking to Sarah and is working on transferring the call to the fire department. You then hear the car door open and Sarah start screaming “Oh my God, oh my God, stop it, stop it, no!” When the operator returns and the call is answered by the fire department, Sarah is then unable to answer them.
Officials spent the next hour trying to track Sarah’s cell phone signal to a general area, and then another 911 call came in. At 8:30 PM, an employee at the Omni Mandalay Hotel called to report a taxi in the hotel’s cab stand line with no driver around, a body slumped in the passenger seat, and another body in the backseat. They said the person in the passenger seat had blood coming out of her ear, and that they did not appear to be moving.
The police arrived to find both girls were dead, they had been shot multiple times. The abandoned cab they were in was quickly traced back to their father. Almost immediately, police issued an arrest warrant for Yaser.
So – Just who was Yaser Said? What could possibly drive him to shoot his own 2 daughters? How in the hell did we get here?
The Said Family
Yaser Abdel Said was born January 27, 1957 in Synai, Egypt. He has 3 brothers, Mohsen, Yousri, and Yassein, and 1 sister Ghada. Yaser and his siblings came to America in 1983. They left for a fresh start after their father divorced their mother, remarried and began another family back in Egypt. Four years later, Yaser was 30 and working at a convenience store in Hurst, Texas, when he met 15 year old Patricia “Tissie” Owens, who was born and raised in Texas. Yaser gifted Tissie with presents and told her family that he was wealthy and that he owned land in Egypt.
Within just a few short weeks, her parents signed papers allowing their minor daughter to marry a man twice her age. They wed on February 7, 1987. The wedding reception, held at Yasers families home, showed the divide between everyone. The men sat in one room, the women in another. All the food was in the room with the men. Many people in Tissie’s family believed Yaser was using her to stay in America as his visa was apparently about to expire. He did apply for and receive permanent residency after his marriage to Tissie.
Yaser and Tissie had 3 children together; Islam, born in 1988, Amina in 1989, and Sarah in 1990. Tissie would later claim that Yaser was physically and mentally abusive to her. At times. Other times she would say that any instance in which she previously accused him of abuse they were “just joking around” or not being serious.
A history of abuse
When Amina and Sarah were in grade school, Amina told her teacher that she was having sex with her father. This obviously concerned her teacher. She brought this to their mother’s attention. Tissie says she brought them to the children’s hospital and had them examined and her mother turned Yaser in to CPS. The exam wasn’t definitive but “could not rule out sexual abuse.” And I won’t go into the specifics of the allegations- you can see some of the reports in the documentary, but the majority of the ways that the girls said Yaser abused them may not leave any physical evidence.
Eventually, Tissie convinced the girls to recant their statements and told them to tell authorities that they’d lied because they wanted to live with their grandmother. Amina wrote a letter to her aunt telling her exactly this. Her mom made her recant, and she didn’t want to go back to living with her father, begging them not to make her return home. Her aunt hid the letter in her closet and believes that Tissie (who was staying with her and her family at the time) stole it after Amina told her she’d written the letter. The letter has never been recovered.
There are NUMEROUS home videos that Yaser took of the girls. He literally seemed to have a camera on them 24/7. In one video they are laying in their bed (that I think they shared, even in high school), and they are trying to cover up with blankets while their father is video taping them. They are trying to lay on their stomachs and avoid being filmed and repeatedly asking him to stop, go away, stop filming. He instructs Islam to remove the blankets and at one point he zooms in on one of the girls’ legs saying “oh, nice legs.” And on one of their butts going “oooh, that’s nice.” It’s FUCKING DISGHUSTING.
The girls also had evidence of physical abuse. Many friends and relatives reported seeing them with bruises, Amina alleging that Yaser had woken her up one day by kicking her in the stomach and then in the face so hard that her lip became embedded in her braces. In the documentary, they ask Tissie about this, and she says “Amina never had braces. Yaser and Amina were never fighting. He was a great dad and he loved his daughters. He only abused me.”
There is also a video of Yaser spying on Amina at work with a video camera. He sits outside the Kroger that she was working at and filmed her through the window. At one point he asks Tissie who is in the car with him “She can’t see us from inside, right? You’re sure she can’t see us.” And Tissie goes, “I’m sure.” He then says “she smiled at a customer. She’s in trouble.” Tissie says “she has to, baba. That’s part of her job.”
But he doesn’t care. She’s in trouble.
It’s sickening. And while Tissie goes back and forth on whether or not she was abused and claims over and over she had no knowledge of Yaser abusing the girls, she is physically present for much of it. This video shows that she at the very least knew he was stalking Amina, and she helped him.
Early in her teens, Amina wrote that her father was going to kill her. She knew it was going to happen one day. Like an inevitability, not a possibility. When she was 16, he took her to Egypt to begin the process of choosing a husband for her arranged marriage. He was adamant his girls would not marry American men. He found a man in his 40’s that he wanted her to marry, and she refused. She wrote to friends that he was trying to sell her, and that she is an object to be sold to her parents.
It’s strange to me how much Yaser wanted to stay in America himself, but hated the idea of his daughters becoming “too American.” And he married an American woman raised Christian (technically, she did not appear to actually practice Christianity). Tissie has claimed to still identify as Christian at times, and other times identifies as Muslim.
The documentary did a beautiful job of highlighting her lies back to back through different interviews, just her blatant changing of the facts or the circumstances of many things including her religion.
Young Love and their escape
Then Amina meets Joseph Moreno at Taekwondo. They immediately fell for each other. He said that “a girl this beautiful must have a boyfriend” but he learned she didn’t and that she was into him. They had kind of a storybook romance. These were 2 young people genuinely in love and wanting to have a future together. It was seriously the sweetest thing.
Joseph’s mom knew about the relationship and over time Joseph confided in her that Amina was fearful of her father and was being abused. But she had one priority, to keep Joseph safe. She knew that this relationship would put Joseph in danger (as well as herself) if her father found out, so she took many steps to hide the relationship from Yaser.
This is so mature of Amina. I think it shows how much they had to grow up and deal with grown up situations. Most kids her age would have a hard time keeping a secret like that especially when you’re that excited. But she knew she had to or it could have dangerous consequences. They were very careful about communication, and she hid all of their notes/letters to each other.
Yaser found one. Amina had been writing a note to Joseph that she hadn’t finished yet and Yaser confronted her. She lied, telling him she was writing to an imaginary boyfriend and basically wishing that she could have a real boyfriend, but she knew she couldn’t so she made one up. Yaser immediately moved the family to Lewisville, TX. He pulled them out of school, out of Taekwondo, changed their phone numbers, everything. Contact with Joseph abruptly stopped.
At one point, Yaser beat Amina to try to get the name of her boyfriend so that he could “confront” him, likely to attack or kill him. Amina refused, no matter how much he beat her. She wanted to protect the love of her life. Amina finally sent an email to her Taekwondo instructor who got into contact with Joseph’s mom Ruth. She and Amina began communicating through email. Eventually, she resumed contact with Joseph, and they made plans to run away to Vegas and get married.
Amina knew the time was now or never. She had to get away. Sarah and Amina decided to flee their father’s home. Their mother Tissie said she’d always wanted to leave Yaser so they let her come with them. They all removed the SIM cards from their phones and bought prepaid phones to talk on so that Yaser couldn’t trace them.
They first fled to Tissie’s sister’s house but didn’t stay long. They then went to Tulsa, OK and rented an apartment there. Sarah’s boyfriend Eric and a friend Eddie were also with them. They all agreed not to have any contact with Yaser or his family.
Tissie says Yaser’s brother Youssein was calling non stop, and she finally called Yaser after that. She also says she never called either of them. But, whatever. Either way, she was having second thoughts and felt guilty for leaving so she wanted to go back. But she told them that December 31 was the anniversary of her mother’s death and wanted to go back to put flowers on her grave, and they would stay with her aunt while they were there.
Sarah reluctantly went with her.
Amina refused.
It wasn’t until it was pretty much too late that Tissie told Sarah they were actually going back to Yaser. Once back home, Tissie continually, we’re talking like every 30 minutes all day every day, calls Amina begging her to come home. She even has Sarah try to get Amina to call her. Amina kept refusing to come home, but eventually she agreed. According to Tissie, Amina had called her asking to be picked up from her friend’s house, but phone records confirm that Tissie was harassing her until she came back home.
When Amina returned home, Yaser said he wanted to take the girls to dinner, alone, and talk to them about everything. The three got into his taxi cab and drove away.
honor killing
Tracing the cell tower that picked up Sarah’s 911 phone call, police speculate that Yaser had driven to a park on Riverside Drive. He then stopped the car, pulled out a 9 mm pistol, aimed it at Amina, sitting next to him and shot her twice. Hitting her point blank in the chest and severing her spinal cord. He then turned the gun on Sarah, who was sitting in the back seat. She was shot a total of 9 times, in her arms, shoulder and her chest. Yaser then drove less than 3 miles, parked in front of the Omni Hotel and left his dead daughters for others to find.
Yaser immediately fled following the shooting, taking with him his passport and $9,000 in cash. A capital Multiple – Murder warrant has been issued for him, and he still remains on the run today. There is no record of him flying out of the country. A cab driver reported that he may have seen Yaser driving a cab in Newark Airport. Some people have also allegedly seen Yaser in New York City driving a light colored or champagne colored older Mercedes and working as a cab driver. On December 4, 2014, Yaser was added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list with a $100,000 reward with any information leading to his arrest.
Yaser’s physical features may vary in order to conceal his identity. He always wears dark sunglasses, both indoors and outside. Yaser was born in Egypt and may seek shelter in communities with Egyptian ties. He frequents Denny’s and IHOP restaurants and smokes Marlboro Lights 100s cigarettes. Yaser has ties to New York, Texas, Virginia, Canada, and Egypt. Yaser loves dogs, especially tan- and black-colored German Shepherds. He is known to carry a weapon at all times.
If you have any information concerning this person, please contact your local FBI office or the nearest American Embassy or Consulate.
UPDATE — Yaser Said was captured in Justin, Texas, with his son Islam and Brother Yassein after 12 years on the run.
The horrible crime committed against Amina and Sarah has been labeled as an honor killing. So what exactly is honor-based killing / violence?
From GlobalCitizens.ORG:
“Honor-based violence is violence, plain and simple. But it is violence perpetrated with the goal of restoring or protecting the honor of oneself, family, or community. Due to social norms that devalue women as individuals and human beings, honor violence is mostly — though not exclusively — committed against women and girls. It is committed as a punishment and redemption for the perceived shame or disgrace a woman has brought upon her family and/or community.
The victim’s family members, who believe they have been disgraced, are generally the perpetrators of honor violence, so it is sometimes compared to domestic violence. However, acts of domestic violence do not typically have the same shame or honor motivation and are usually committed by an individual. Honor violence, on the other hand, may be committed by several people or result from a collective effort, and aims to secure familial control over a girl or woman’s behavior.
Acts of honor-based violence include female genital mutilation, acid attacks, forced marriage, as well as many other forms of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse. But the most extreme form of honor violence is honor killing — the murder of girls and women by their own mothers, fathers, and brothers. Both immediate and extended family members, seeking to reclaim their honor, are frequently involved in the killings. Honor killings may also be ordered by community leaders or tribal councils.
The AHA Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to defending the rights of women and girls in part by collecting accurate data on these crimes, reports that there are between 25 to 28 honor killings a year in the U.S. That may not seem like much, but there are surely many thousands of such incidents every year, and most are hidden from our awareness.
Around the world, honor violence is a greater issue. The United Nations estimates that 5,000 women are killed annually in such a manner, while other organizations put the number at the much higher figure of 20,000. Whatever the count is, it’s too high.
These acts of violence that we have come to call honor violence and honor killings, have no honor in them. There simply is no honorable basis for violence of any kind, but in particular, there is no basis for the kind of systemic violence against women that occurs in the name of honor.”
