Killer Dads

by Mary Papenfuss

  But Wendy’s husband eventually turned out to be the very antithesis of that image. Initially, he demanded Jessica be respectful and obedient, do well in her studies, remain chaste until marriage, and follow the tenets of Islam, including not drinking, and wearing the hair-covering hijab any time she was outside of her home. But his control took a dark twist as she became a teenager, and his attention became an obsession, said Wendy. “There was a point when he wouldn’t let her do what her friends were doing, and they were Muslim girls,” she said. “He wouldn’t let her go to the mall with them. So I went around him. I would drive her to the mall myself, telling him we were going shopping, but I would arrange for her to meet her friends there. That was the start of a lot of things I did for her behind his back.”

  Figure 14.3. Jessica lets her hair down and mugs in her “other life” as a typical Michigan teenager with pal Kayla Chuba. Courtesy of Wendy Wasinski, in memory of her loving daughter and best friend, Jessica Amanda Mohamad Mokdad.

  In a bizarre development, Rahim pressured Jessica at 18 to marry a boyfriend in a religious ceremony that wasn’t legally binding. The two lived for time in the family home. But even though they were “married,” Rahim tried to strictly control their interaction, at times even stopping them from touching one another or even sitting next to each other on the couch, Wendy noted. Jessica eventually left the family’s home in Minnesota and attended Macomb Community College in Michigan, where she pursued different interests, including her passion for art that eventually evolved into photography. She lived for a time with her biological dad, but his second wife was only three years older than Jessica, which sometimes caused tension, according to Wasinski. Jessica eventually moved in with her maternal grandmother. Her “husband” joined her for a time, but their relationship soon waned and they broke up.

  Throughout it all, Jessica fretted about Alfetlawi. “I hate him with a passion,” Jessica wrote of her stepdad to a friend in texts obtained by police. “He’s in love with me. He’s obsessed with me. He would punish me and make me cry every day. I’d like to see his ass beat like he’s done to me all these years.” In one text, she talked of Alfetlawi making a surprise visit to her grandmother’s home where she was staying at the time, and discovering “I don’t wear a scarf.”

  Wasinski says Alfetlawi was never physically abusive, but “you could say he was verbally and psychologically abusive” to Jessica. When her daughter was a little girl, Wendy was glad Alfetlawi cared enough to help raise her and set rules for her, even though he began to slip off the rails as she became older. But she never saw him physically violent. “That’s why it blew my mind when he shot Jessica,” said Wendy.

  Jessica’s biological dad stood by to help as she grew up, but his relationship with his daughter waned because Alfetlawi was jealous of it, according to Wasinski. After Alfetlawi was arrested, he initially told police he had taken a gun to Warren to shoot Mohammed Mokdad, but accidentally shot Jessica instead.

  Jessica was living in Michigan when Alfetlawi “abducted” her and “forced” her to return to the family’s home in Minnesota, she said in texts, just weeks before her murder. She remained there until her mom took her to the train station while Alfetlawi slept so Jessica could return to her grandmother’s home. That was the last time Wendy would see Jessica alive. “I hugged her and I kissed her and told her I loved her, and let her go,” Wasinski recalled. She usually kept in daily phone contact with her daughter while she lived in Michigan, but always called from work to conceal her conversations from Alfetlawi.

  On the train, a distraught, shaken Jessica poured out her heart to a lawyer she met on the trip. She revealed to him that her stepfather had a long history of control and abuse, he later testified at Alfetlawi’s trial. Alfetlawi was temperamental and would often “lose it,” she said, and used “fear, intimidation and violence to get his way,” Jessica told him. Alfetlawi had threatened to harm her and her mother if she attempted to run away again, added Jessica, who described a pattern of multiple forms of abuse against her and her mother, adding that her most recent dispute with her stepdad concerned her decision to not wear the hijab. Jessica used Marlowe’s phone to text her friends while she was traveling because she feared Alfetlawi was tracking her calls. The texts recovered from his cell phone, coupled with his testimony, was key in the decision to file first-degree murder charges against Alfetlawi. Jessica was clearly terrified of her stalking stepdad and was fleeing from him.

  Figure 14.4. Jessica flashes a smile in a hijab she often wore. She argued with her stepfather when she opted not to wear a veil, and texted a friend about her conflicts with Alfetlawi shortly before he murdered her. Courtesy of Wendy Wasinski, in memory of her loving daughter and best friend, Jessica Amanda Mohamad Mokdad.

  The day Jessica arrived back in Warren, she helped her grandmother sort through her late great-grandmother’s things. Alfetlawi drove from his Minnesota home to help, he said, and carried boxes of belongings to his mother-in-law’s house where Jessica was staying. “He wanted me to come along, but I had to work, and it would be a long drive to have to turn around again,” said Wasinski. “He told me he loved me when he left.”

  Later that day, after Alfetlawi shot Jessica, he phoned Wendy. “He told me he was going to turn himself in to the police. I said, ‘What’s going on? Why are you going to the police?’” Wasinski recalled. “He said, ‘I smacked Jessica. You’re probably going to hear about it.’ He told me he loved me, then hung up. So I’m in a panic and I call my mom to ask her where Jessica is. She doesn’t really know, so she goes to Jessica’s room and sees her lying on the floor. But she doesn’t see blood, so she thinks Jessica might just be unconscious, and goes outside for help.” Jessica’s grandmother called out to a neighbor passing by, and he rushed in to help, checked Jessica, and he realized “right away she’s dead,” said Wasinski.

  The first thing Wasinski thought of was to kill herself, she told me, but the image of a woman from her mosque came into her head, and she phoned her instead. The woman arrived to calm her down, sat with her, and helped arrange for payment for a trip to Warren for Wendy. “I saw Rahim in jail and demanded to know what happened. He had said he couldn’t tell me on the phone because he knew I would freak out. He told me to my face that it was an accident, and acted like it was big surprise she was dead,” recalled Wasinski. “I said, ‘Shut up, quit acting.’” Alfetlawi tried various stories on the police. First, he insisted he was out to get Mohamed Mokdad and accidentally shot Jessica, then he said a gun he carried for protection accidentally went off when Jessica hugged him. He later claimed he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder from years of torture in Saddam Hussein’s jails. It took a jury 30 minutes to convict him, and he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

  Judge David Viviano made it a point to stress that Jessica’s murder was not an honor killing but stemmed largely from Alfetlawi’s “bizarre obsession” with Jessica’s “every move.” There is “no religion which sanctions your actions,” Viviano said to Alfetlawi. “This was not an honor killing. There is no code of honor that supports a coward and a hypocrite.” Alfetlawi was driven to dictate every aspect of Jessica’s behavior, and “in his last act of control, he took her life,” said the judge.

  Figure 14.5. Jessica’s stepdad, Rahim Alfetlawi, is led away in handcuffs following his sentencing. He apologized to the court for murdering Jessica, the girl he had raised from the age of eight. Reprinted by permission from David Posavetz.

  Figure 14.6. Jessica Mokdad’s mom, Wendy Wasinski, listens to the judge in a Michigan courtroom send ex-husband Rahim Alfetlawi to life in prison for murdering her daughter. Reprinted by permission from David Posavetz.

  Rahim apologized to the court before he was sentenced, “but not to me, which really pissed me off,” said Wendy. In her victim impact statement before Alfetlawi’s sentencing, the bitter mom addressed him: “You said before that Allah, God, the prophet Muhammad, and his family were wit
h you. And now, as you can see after all the prayers you made during the trial, they are not with you. Allah, God, will not forgive you for what you’ve done, and neither will I. You took my daughter from me, my only child. You are a coldhearted killer and deserve to spend all your life in prison. She spent her life taking orders from you. Now you will spend the rest of your life taking orders from prison guards, and you can see how that feels. I hope every day in prison feels like a year, and every year feels like ten.”

  Wasinski is still stunned by the murder of her daughter by a man she lived with and trusted for 12 years. She believes it was largely triggered by the fury of Rahim at Jessica’s refusal to follow his orders and her efforts to break free from him. Wendy now knows that Rahim likely considered Jessica a kind of wife to him, and that her independence represented a sort of divorce that infuriated him. “He was obsessed with her, I realize now,” she said in our interview. “He was sexually attracted to her, and it’s something I didn’t see at the time, but when I look back now, everything is much clearer. There was a point he would try to hug and kiss Jessica, and she would push him away, saying she was too old for that. I only realized in hindsight what was happening.” The catalyst for the murder may have been Jessica’s revelation to her mom that Rahim had raped her. Her daughter told her of the assault the night before her murder, in a cell-phone call to Wendy as her mom was driving. “‘I need to tell you that Rahim raped me before,’” Wasinski quoted her daughter as telling her. “She said it was a couple of years ago,” after she was with Mike, the teen Rahim made Jessica marry. Rahim “had bugged my car, so he could have figured out what Jessica was telling me by listening to my side of the conversation,” said Wasinski. He likely feared prosecution for the rape, she believes, but may have also been concerned about how revelation of the attack would damage his honor in her eyes and in the view of his friends and the public. It’s possible, Wasinski believes, that he could have blamed Jessica for his sexual attraction to her. But another key component in the murder were likely “mental problems” related to his imprisonment and torture in Iraq, she’s convinced, which appeared to be more of a problem as he grew older. He suffered from anxiety and night terrors, for which he was being treated, said Wasinski. He had been prescribed medicine as part of his treatment, but he took the drugs only sporadically, she added.

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  As prosecutors prepared their case against Rahim Alfetlawi, others were battling the latest culture clash provoked by Jessica’s murder, a conflict with implications for concerns about and understanding of violence against women and children. A conservative faction fearing the “talibanization” of the country by American Muslims hosted a controversial “Jessica Mokdad Human Rights Conference” at the Dearborn Hyatt a year after her death. The conference logo was a drawing of Jessica wearing a hijab with a tear trailing down her cheek, crying out “help” in a cartoon bubble over her head. It was hosted by Pamela Geller, author of Atlas Shrugged, and famous for spearheading the opposition against establishing a mosque at Ground Zero in Manhattan, and who referred to herself in a 2010 New York Times interview as a “racist-Islamophobic-anti-Muslim-bigot.”2

  “Thank you for coming and being brave,” and withstanding the “Islamaphobic narrative that we get smeared with all the time,” Geller said as she opened the videotaped April 29, 2011, conference. It’s “important that we’re here today, it’s very important that we increase awareness of honor killing,” she said, and asked why the local Muslim community isn’t “speaking out against honor killings. This girl, Jessica Mokdad, who was honor-murdered, lived in abject fear of her life, she feared being honor-killed” because she resisted “Islamic tradition,” Geller added. “These girls deserve the same freedoms, the same rights to choose as every other American.” Geller criticized local officials for backing off their “honor killing” label in the murder. Assistant Prosecutor William Cataldo has said Alfetlawi “wanted her sexually—well, FYI, that’s part of honor killing,” said Geller. A friend of Jessica’s, Darwin Jiles, also spoke at the conference, calling her a “beautiful person inside and out. She was definitely someone who really wanted to discover God for herself.”

  Interestingly, one of the speakers made a point to emphasize that Jessica’s murder was not domestic violence. It was a “final act of control because she shamed his family,” said conservative journalist Michael Coren of Toronto’s Sun TV. “This wasn’t domestic violence. This was an honor killing. It’s different.”

  Figure 14.7. Jessica poses with a rose, without her hijab. She was becoming increasingly skilled in photography before her death. Courtesy of Wendy Wasinski, in memory of her loving daughter and best friend, Jessica Amanda Mohamad Mokdad.

  The same day, the Arab American Society and other organizations hosted a counter conference, “Rejecting Islamophobia: A Community Stand against Hate,” in another hotel a few miles away. It featured religious and community leaders and politicians, who decried discrimination against Muslims in America, discussed funding for hate groups, and talked about political exploitation of cultural conflicts. Democratic Rep. Hansen Clarke, who represents the Detroit area and is on the committee for Homeland Security, talked of being singled out by security even on government business because he’s not Caucasian. He’s the son of an African-American mom and a Muslim dad from India, now Bangladesh (though Clarke himself is a Catholic). He called an attack on Muslim immigrants an “attack on us all” and on the Constitution, asking at one point, “How dare people undermine our faith in God?” Neither honor killings, nor Jessica’s murder, were mentioned in a tape of the conference.

  Vincent Van Gogh’s 47-year-old great grandnephew, Theo, was riding his bike in Amsterdam when he was struck by bullets that catapulted him through the air to land on the cobblestone intersection of Linnaeusstraat and Tweede Oosterparkstraat. As the wounded Van Gogh pleaded for his life, Dutch-Moroccan gunman Mohammed Bouyeri shot him four more times, then opened his neck with a knife and nailed a five-page letter to Van Gogh’s chest with a second knife.

  The 2004 killing was punishment, and the letter was addressed to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Somali-born member of Dutch parliament, and a Muslim turned atheist. Hirsi Ali and Van Gogh had collaborated on a controversial film, Submission, a ten-minute movie in English about oppression of Muslim women. “Theo and I knew it was a dangerous film to make,” Hirsi Ali, now 41, writes in her book Infidel.1 “However, some things must be said, and there are times when silence becomes an accomplice to injustice.”

  Hirsi Ali is now involved in the debate about American honor killings. She knows what it’s like to be Muslim living in a Western country, and realizes that attitudes and customs she had hoped to escape can continue to stalk a girl in a new culture.

  In 2007, Hirsi Ali and supporters launched the AHA Foundation headquartered in New York to “protect and defend the rights of women and girls in the West from oppression justified by religion and culture,” according to the organization’s website.2 The group tracks and members speak out about honor killings and assaults, forced marriages, and genital mutilation. Though the issues are far more significant in some other Western nations, American “honor killings” have occurred. Though the killings in North America—all victims have been female—are rare, the loss of a single life is unacceptable, AHA spokeswoman Amanda Parker told me in a phone interview. And while the public is aware of only a handful of cases, AHA is convinced that there have, in fact, been “dozens,” said Parker. The killings also point to an underlying world of behaviors such as forced marriage and nonfatal child abuse linked to expectations about daughters and concepts of honor and punishment.

  For every honor killing in the United States “there are hundreds of other cases of honor abuse, from the mild to the extreme, that are often brought on by things like dating, drinking, dressing ‘immodestly’ or rejecting Islam,” cardiologist Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, and a commissioner on the US Commission on International Religious Fr
eedom, wrote in a 2012 opinion piece in USA Today.3 Jasser, like the AHA, is attempting to walk a political tightrope between the shrill Pamela Geller, who used Jessica Mokdad’s killing to Islam-bash, and officials of some Arab activist organizations who are reluctant to admit that any honor killings have occurred in America.

  Girls at home in America who may feel threatened because of perceived issues of honor are often faced with more difficulty in obtaining help from civil authorities because so few officials have any experience dealing with their situations or recognizing legitimate danger signs. A girl may tell a social worker or a teacher or a cop, “‘My dad’s going to kill me because I’m wearing too much makeup,’ and the cop thinks, ‘Yeah, I just told my daughter that last week,’” Parker explained to me. But in a rare instance, it “can actually be a life-or-death situation,” she said. AHA last year helped a 17-year-old girl who first learned she was pregnant sitting in her pediatrician’s examining room with her mother. “Dad’s going to kill me,” she said. Again, the comment wasn’t the kind of typical hyperbolic response many American teens might give in such a situation. “She really and truly believed her father was going to take her life,” said Parker. “Her mother told her, ‘I can’t protect you from your father. I’m disowning you,’ and stood up and walked out.” The pediatrician attempted to hospitalize the girl to protect her until some arrangements could be made, but the hospital refused because the girl wasn’t ill. AHA, contacted by the pediatrician, reached out for help to a local child-protection agency, which couldn’t take action, officials explained, because there was no history of abuse and no physical harm. Finally, a detective who had investigated an Arizona honor killing of two teenage daughters in his precinct contacted local police to explain the danger the girl might be in and urged them to check on her at home. When police arrived, they found the teen covered with bruises, and she was removed to a shelter, said Parker. She lives apart from her family now and is raising her baby daughter. To help officials spot danger zones, AHA offers training to police and social workers who may encounter honor threats in a home or receive pleas of help from a frightened child.