Killer Dads (32 page)

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 with 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.

———

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
.
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“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.