Original subtitles

A fatal fall from a second floor

window of a Detroit mansion.

I start screaming and I run to my brother's room.

A devoted mom's life cut short.

Bassel arrives, sees his estranged wife dead,

and he drops in shock.

Was it simply just tragic misfortune?

The physical examination did find

fractures consistent with a fall of this kind.

Or murder?

Nada Huranieh have moved here to Michigan

from Syria in the Middle East.

Her husband, Bassel Altantawi, was a medical doctor

and set up a practice here in Metro Detroit.

Nada and Bassel had come to the United States

from Syria.

They were raising their children

in Farmington Hills, which is a very nice suburb of Detroit.

They were devout Muslims.

They were members of a local mosque,

and they had three children-- their son Muhammad

and two daughters, including Aya.

My name is Aya Altantawi.

My mom was a very, very kind person.

She put everybody before her and she loved us.

She loved her kids.

She and I, we had a pretty good relationship.

We bonded over makeup.

She was very, very good at it.

She was very passionate about the gym,

about working out, just feeling like the best

version of herself.

Such was not as love of fitness

that she eventually turned her passion into a career,

working as a personal trainer at her local gym

in Farmington Hills.

She was becoming more independent.

She was actually living her life for the first time.

She and I would go to the gym, I would do my session,

she would be working out, or she would

be teaching her own clients.

And then we'd work out for a little bit at the end

and then we'd go home.

Nada embraced the sense

of freedom and independence that her new career gave her.

But her husband, Bassel, wasn't so supportive.

He didn't like it.

He didn't think it was necessary for her

to be independent.

He thought that his role for the family

was to be the provider, so there was no need for her

to be independent, because we all were reliant on him

and he was there to provide everything we needed,

so he didn't like that.

He wanted, I think, us to be just lost without him.

My dad was very old-school in his thinking, to put it nicely.

So my mom wanting to get a job, to work at the gym,

to live her life, to him was she's becoming Americanized.

And he didn't want that.

There became turmoil in their marriage

based on Nada's desire to become more Westernized,

and Bassel's desire to have a traditional wife

within their religious practices.

He did say that once she removed

the hijab, that she wasn't really a person anymore.

He didn't consider her to be a person,

and that was the part that really disturbed me.

They would have arguments,

but at first it was always "don't talk

about it around the kids, wait until the kids are gone."

But eventually that pretense dropped

and it was just all out in the open, constant

yelling and screaming for my dad towards my mom.

He 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.

He was a man who was used to being in control,

and that included in his tradition

being in control of his wife.

And he was losing that control, and

it was very upsetting to him.

In early 2016, Bassel and

Nada's volatile relationship escalated to whole new levels.

Around Valentine's Day, I remember I woke up to hearing

them screaming and arguing.

And I opened my door and I went to the railing

to look down and see what was going on.

And 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 her

phone back.

And he went to their bedroom and he

was standing behind the door.

And my mom put her hand in the door to try to pry it open,

and my dad slammed it shut on her hand.

Eventually, I called the police and they arrested him.

They took him to police station.

They put a tether on him, an ankle monitor.

So he wasn't allowed to come back to the house

under any circumstance.

Bassel would eventually be charged

with domestic violence.

He would plead no contest, but it would be the beginning

of the end of their marriage.

Bassel was also issued with a protective order,

banning him from the family home.

Shortly after his domestic violence charge,

Nada started divorce proceedings

while juggling her career alongside parenting

three young children as a single mom.

This divorce between Bassel and Nada

was definitely what I would call a high conflict divorce.

There was a lot of contention.

I was concerned about Nada's general safety,

but there was a court order in place that protected her.

A lot of times nobody knew what

she was going through because she didn't

want to talk about her issues.

She wanted to talk about what was bothering the people

that she loved, so that she can try to help them.

Most of the time, we didn't know what the details

of what she was going through.

Approximately 18 months after the incident

between Bassel and Nada, on the morning of Monday, August 21,

2017, 14-year-old Aya was preparing

for her usual school day.

It was the second week of my sophomore year of high school.

I was excited.

But that day, I woke up late.

Normally my mom would already be awake.

She would have had her coffee or whatever.

I think I remember hearing my brother's shower on,

but nobody else was awake in the house.

So I thought, "OK, let me get ready and then I'll see

where everybody else is at."

I finished getting ready and I sat on my bed and I was like,

"OK, this is really strange."

It's like 6:15-ish.

Nobody else seems to be awake.

We're going to be late.

So I called my mom but didn't get a response.

So I was like, "OK, I'm going to go find

her and see what's going on."

I went to the guest bedroom.

That was where she would do her makeup every morning.

The window was open and I thought, "maybe, just in case,

let me go look out there."

The guest bedroom was

towards the back of the house.

It was two floors up and looked out over a concrete patio,

which was 22 feet down.

Inside 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.

When 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.

I start screaming and I run to my brother's room.

I open his door and I said, "our mom's outside.

Our mom's outside."

He was like, "what?

What are you talking about?"

I think he was falling behind me at this point,

and I was running out the garage to go around the house,

and I just kept--

I was telling him, "come on, we have to go.

Our mom's outside."

Despite how distressing

this was, Aya just seen her mother.

She was able to get her brother to come down to the patio

where her mother was, and she called 911.

Oakland County Police officers raced to Nada's home,

while a 911 operator stayed on the line with Aya.

Aya gave her brother Muhammad the phone at this point.

He then started following the dispatcher's instructions

to give CPR to his mom.

At around 6:40 AM, as Muhammad was performing CPR on his mom,

the police arrived.

Aya directed the officers

as they arrived, while the 911 operators probed

Muhammad on what had happened.

Officer Nathan Jordan was the first one

to arrive on the scene.

He checked Nada.

She was still warm to the touch,

but she would later be declared dead on the scene.

After mother of three Nada Huranieh fatally fell from

a second floor window, her 14-year-old daughter Aya,

who had found her mother's body,

was unaware that she had been pronounced dead at the scene.

When they took her, I was under the impression

that she was going to the hospital to be worked on.

I thought, "OK, she's going to be in the ICU,

obviously critical condition," but not death.

I thought, "we probably wouldn't get

any update for a couple of hours,

but she was still alive."

But no, she was declared dead on the scene.

But I didn't know that until hours later.

Aya's younger sister had been asleep

during the whole incident, so the only people

who were there at the time were Aya and her brother Muhammad.

So they were both interviewed by police at the scene.

In the guest bedroom, there were streaks on the window

as well as an iPhone left on top of the dresser.

There was no immediate signs of a struggle or forced entry

that the police could see, so they assumed that this

had been a tragic accident.

Whilst Nada had been cleaning the window, she'd fallen.

They were asking us a lot of questions.

They were asking what our mom's normal routine

was, if it was normal for her to clean the windows.

I said, "no, that's not normal."

Any cleaning that she would do would

be like washing leftover dishes from the night

before, but not cleaning the outside of a window.

She would normally hire a company to come do that.

And then they were also asking about my mom's history,

if she ever attempted to harm herself.

And I adamantly, immediately said no.

And my brother was like, "Aya, you

didn't know this but, yeah, she tried to kill herself once."

And I turned to him and I was like,

"what are you talking about?

No, she didn't."

And he's like, "Aya, you didn't know this.

But yeah, she tried taking a bunch of pills."

I just didn't think it was true.

I thought there would have been no way I didn't know about it

if our mother overdosed.

It didn't make sense.

No matter which way I tried to spin it,

there was no plausible explanation.

As Aya and her siblings

were all under 18 and alone, emergency services

called their estranged father Bassel to come

and look after the children.

Bassel arrives and he sees his estranged

wife dead on the patio, and he drops to his knees in shock.

At this point, Aya still didn't know that her mother was dead.

It was the first time Bassel

had returned to the family home since the protective order.

His behavior and comments to his daughter Aya

raised suspicions among investigators.

That day I had gym,

so I was wearing leggings and a shirt and the back of it

had an open back cutout.

My dad comes into the house, and he's like,

"Aya, what are you wearing?

You're going to go to hell if you keep dressing like that."

And I'm just thinking, "what is wrong with you?

This is the first time you're seeing me in over a year and

a half, and the first thing you're saying to me is,

Aya, you're going to go to hell if you

keep dressing like that?"

Aya's father, immediately commenting

on her state of dress after Aya has just witnessed this very

traumatic experience, and is a child who actually needs

consoling, is very telling about his sort of attitude,

approach to family, and I believe attitude towards women

as well.

Still unaware that her mom Nada's fall was fatal,

Aya was desperate to find out her condition.

My dad took us to a bunch of different places that day.

I think we were coming back from one

of his friends' houses.

We were in the car, my dad driving,

and he was on the phone with his mom talking in Arabic.

And we were pulling up into our driveway and he said,

"oh, Nada's dead."

Everybody gets out of the car and I say to my dad,

"when were you planning on telling

me that our mother was dead?"

And he turns to me and his face drops.

He starts crying.

He turns to me and he--

he's like, "Aya, we have to stick together.

We only have each other now.

We have to be there for each other."

And he's hugging me and I just have my arms down at my sides.

I'm not hugging him back.

I didn't trust him.

I didn't feel safe with him.

I didn't-- I didn't want to be around him.

I think it just reinforced that any hope I had for him

changing, becoming empathetic, becoming a father was gone.

Security and stability are key pillars

of any child's upbringing.

Just needs, basic, fundamental needs.

And for Aya, all of that has been ripped

away in a matter of hours.

Her mom has passed.

She already has a very complicated relationship

with her abusive father.

And 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.

On August 22, the morning after Nada had died,

the medical examiner carried out an initial autopsy

on her body.

She had suffered scrapes and fractures

consistent with a fall from height,

but there was no blood found under her body.

She 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.

That means she couldn't have jumped.

She couldn't have accidentally fallen.

She died before she fell on the patio below.

They went back to run further tests, and at the same time,

police returned to the house with a search warrant.

There were six security cameras around the outside

of the house, and they confiscated the equipment

for further review.

Unfortunately, none of the cameras

looked directly at the guest bedroom,

but there was a bit of footage found that blew

the investigation open.

Detectives came across surveillance of the spot

where Nada's body was found.

And on footage recorded at 5:54 AM, they saw Nada's body

falling to the ground.

But when they looked at it again,

they spotted something chilling in the shadow

of the second floor bedroom from where Nada fell.

On the left of the frame, a light

appears to come on, followed by a curtain

opening in the guest bedroom.

A 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.

This is not someone who's accidentally

fallen to their death, they're on their own.

Someone else is there and is involved.

This fundamentally changed the investigation.

This was now a homicide, not an accident.

They could clearly see somebody had pushed

Nada's body out of the window.

But whose shadow was it?

The first person who came to mind

for many was Nada's estranged husband, Dr. Bassel Altantawi.

Bassel's history of domestic violence

after slamming a door on Nada's hand,

stood out as a red flag for detectives.

The police immediately look at Bassel as a suspect

and you can understand why.

In the US, it's estimated that up to nearly 50%

of all female victims of homicide

have been murdered by intimate partners, past or current.

And so combining that with Bassel'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.

Investigators were also aware

that during divorce proceedings between Bassel and Nada,

he had become the subject of another criminal investigation.

Bassel had found himself in some serious legal trouble

after there had been an investigation into his clinic.

Bassel was convicted of health fraud

in the state of Michigan.

That was handled by the attorney general of the state

of Michigan at the time.

He had to pay a heavy fine, and

he lost his medical license.

But investigators were

shocked to discover that their prime suspect,

Bassel, had an airtight alibi.

As part of his protective order,

Bassel wore a GPS tracking ankle monitor that fed his

location to authorities 24/7.

Turns out he was 20 miles away when Nada died.

Bassel Altantawi was not the killer.

After detectives spotted a shadowy figure

on a surveillance camera pushing the body of 35-year-old

mother of three Nada Huranieh from a second floor window,

investigators began to narrow down their hunt for her killer.

They now knew that her abusive, estranged husband

had a rock solid alibi.

So 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.

The day after Nada was killed, police wanted to interview

both Aya and Muhammad.

And their dad, Bassel, suggested

that the best place to do that would be the family home.

Aya went to school.

And when Bassel went to pick her up,

Muhammad was being interviewed by police.

Sat at the family's dining table,

detectives quizzed 16-year-old Muhammad about his mom.

Muhammad's attitude towards his parents' divorce comes up,

and he acknowledges that there was some difficult feelings

there, which is understandable and happens, I'm going to say,

in pretty much every case of divorce

where children might find that situation difficult.

So nothing raises initial significant alarm bells.

Muhammad still seems to have a pretty strong relationship

with his father, and certainly stronger than that his sisters

have with him.

And 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,

because clearly that's disrupted

the relationship between his father and his sisters,

but doesn't seem to have between them.

Police knew that it was only the children who'd

been in the house that day.

So they began to question Muhammad

about who this figure that they'd seen on the CCTV

could be.

Although Muhammad claimed his sister was awake

before him, investigators already knew it couldn't have

been her in the guest bedroom.

The investigators had a crucial detail

from this footage that the person had short hair.

So that ruled out Aya.

Although Muhammad denied

being in the guest bedroom with his mother that morning,

police continued to press him about his whereabouts.

Muhammad's story

has now shifted significantly.

Now, 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.

Under pressure, Muhammad's story really starts

to fluctuate quite a bit.

He admits that he was in the room with his mom.

He was helping her out while she was cleaning,

holding the ladder for her.

But then when she fell, in shock,

he took himself off to the shower.

When you're looking at a police interview,

there is a very key difference between someone

adding in additional pieces of information

and changing information.

And what we're starting to see here

is that Muhammad is starting to err on changing information,

and that can be a real red flag for potential deceit.

At this point, Bassel arrived home

and stopped the interview.

Following Muhammad's shock confession

that he was in the room at the time of his mom's death,

police interviewed the children separately

to avoid them communicating or corroborating

on one version of events.

Aya used her police interview as an opportunity

to explain that she didn't want to live under the care

of her abusive father.

When 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 am

not going back home with him.

And yeah, I chose to go into foster care.

Me 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.

So it was a no-brainer for me.

On August 24, 2017, three days

after Nada's fatal push, Aya received an unexpected message

on her cell phone.

I got a text from somebody that I had gone

to middle school with, and he had texted me saying,

"Aya, I am so sorry for your loss,

but do you think he did it?"

And I was like, "do I think who did what?"

He said, "I'm so sorry, you didn't hear?

They're charging your brother?"

I found out from a middle school classmate

that my brother was being charged

with the death of my mother.

I was in shock.

It was more like an out-of-body experience

where, OK, 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.

I'm just-- I don't know, I--

On 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.

The family kept to themselves.

But after a few days of it being in the news,

Nada's friends started calling police.

Nada would tell them that Muhammad, 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.

Processing the news that her brother had

been arrested and charged for the murder of his own mother,

Aya reflected on Muhammad's behavior

in the lead up to Nada's death.

He was becoming a lot more assertive, a lot more violent.

I 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.

My brother was in contact with my dad a lot.

Just became a little like spy essentially for my dad

because this was during their divorce case.

I had an encounter with Muhammad

that led me to believe that Muhammad had taken his father's

side in the divorce.

It's actually a blizzard here in Michigan,

and I parked my car close to the house.

I met with Nada.

I had not seen Muhammad.

And then when I went to leave, when I went to get into my car,

Muhammad was actually standing right behind my car,

and he seemed to be recording my license plate.

The only thing I could think of that

made sense under the circumstances

that he was going to be reporting to his father.

So he was trying to find anything

he could to give to my dad to use as leverage is

my guess in the divorce case.

So it made sense that he did it.

So I still thought, "OK, maybe somehow he accidentally did it

or he didn't mean to do it," or I don't know,

I guess I didn't fully believe that it was 100% intentional.

Aya is a young and vulnerable girl

in this situation, whose entire life has been torn

apart in a matter of moments.

And 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.

While Muhammad awaited trial

for the murder of his own mother,

his father, Bassel, hired a veteran defense

attorney named Michael Ciano.

One of the first things

that Michael did was highlight that the day after Nada died,

Muhammad was interviewed by three police officers

without his dad or an attorney present.

He 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.

The court ruled in their favor,

meaning prosecutors were unable to call in Muhammad's kitchen

table interview for the trial.

But in November 2017, during a preliminary court hearing,

new details of Nada's autopsy report

were revealed to the public for the first time.

The key finding, which investigators

were already aware of, was that Nada had died by asphyxiation.

She had been smothered to death.

Armed with evidence that Nada had been murdered,

investigators continued to build their case

and discovered that Muhammad resented his mother

for the failure of his parents' marriage,

and had taken his father's side during the divorce.

In 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.

Or when she would try to take his phone because he

was texting her 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.

It was just very bizarre.

Despite her brother's arrest and his murder

charge, Aya was still holding on to that hope

that he might be innocent.

I 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.

There 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?

After extended legal wranglings

over the use of a police interview,

Muhammad Altantawi spent years awaiting trial

for the murder of his mother, Nada Huranieh, who

had been suffocated before being pushed

out of a second floor window.

In March 2022, nearly five years after Nada's death,

Muhammad Altantawi's murder trial began.

Muhammad Altantawi would go on trial,

charged as an adult with first-degree

premeditated murder.

I was not at the trial.

I had, at that point, moved jobs and

moved back to the prosecutor's office,

who was prosecuting Muhammad.

So I had nothing to do with the prosecution of the case,

by order of the prosecutor.

Although Muhammad 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.

A 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.

The death of a mother at the hands of a child?

Almost unheard of.

In opening statements at the trial,

prosecutors focused on the motive and

also the family dynamics, that Muhammad

had a hatred for his mother, her growing

need for more independence, her new Americanized lifestyle.

And the timing, Nada was set to give

a deposition against Muhammad's father in the divorce.

He wanted to stop that.

Nada 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

Bassel's attorney would question Nada,

and I, in turn, would question Bassel.

And I got the impression that she

did not think that the deposition

was ever going to take place.

Why that is?

I don't know.

I 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.

As it turned out, we'll never know because Nada passed

away a couple days later.

This case wasn't just about the physical facts

of who was where and when.

It was about a family split down the middle,

and whether hatred between a father, wife, and a son

could really cause someone to kill.

The big question for prosecutors

was whether they would be able to convince

a jury that a son was capable of killing his own mother.

Part of the prosecution's case focused on inconsistencies

at the crime scene.

The 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.

The ladder next to the window with a cleaning bottle

of solution on top of it.

One detective testified, that's not a solution

that's used to clean windows.

And next to Nada's body on the patio

below was a towel, a cloth that had

some solution in it that may have also

been used to suffocate Nada.

Then it was time for the prosecution's key evidence:

the surveillance video footage.

Prosecution showed the jury, the video evidence, the shadows

from the surveillance cameras.

A person with short hair dragging something over

to the window, then hoisting it out the window

just moments before Nada's body would hit the ground.

They also pointed out that inside

the house were only the three children

and only one had short hair--

Muhammad.

At one point in the video,

Muhammad could be seen giving his mother CPR.

But according to the prosecution,

only half-heartedly.

Furthermore, while on the phone to emergency services,

he was not giving her chest compressions at all

and was simply counting.

1, 2, 3, 4.

1, 2, 3, 4.

1, 2, 3, 4.

Prosecutors suggested that this

was because Muhammad already knew his mother was dead.

Then they highlighted key evidence

from Muhammad Altantawi's phone.

Prosecutors knew it would be extremely difficult to convince

a jury that a 16-year-old son would kill his own mother,

but they had more good circumstantial evidence,

including Muhammad's phone records.

In fact, he had his mother in his phone

as a contact named "Dog."

To call somebody a dog and your own mom

nonetheless, who did nothing to deserve that, just why?

Muhammad saving his mother's name as Dog in his phone

is incredibly misogynistic language

and really implies a hatred not just towards his mother,

but to women.

And I think we can really see a potential influence there

from his father's own attitudes and behaviors

towards women in his life and how

that might have impacted then on Muhammad's own opinions

and behaviors, too.

The prosecution also used Muhammad's phone

to demonstrate motive.

Just weeks before she was killed,

Nada texted her son Muhammad to tell

him she would have to testify in the divorce case.

She would have to say truthfully about what happened

with abuse and misconduct.

Prosecutors argue that Muhammad wanted to protect his father,

that this had serious legal and personal implications,

that he wanted to stop Nada from testifying

to protect his father.

But there was more strong evidence.

Prosecutors presented to the jury

that Muhammad took pictures of the guest room and

that open window and sent them to his father

three weeks before Nada was killed.

Also revealed was further evidence from his phone.

In the early morning hours of the day that Nada died,

there were phone calls between Muhammad and his father.

He had told police he was asleep before learning

of his mother's death.

Even though the trial raised some questions

about what Bassel knew about what Muhammad was planning

to do to Nada, Bassel Altantawi has

never been charged with anything in connection

to her murder.

Aya testified at that the trial

about what was going on in their family five years

earlier, when she was only 14.

I didn't see it as testifying against my brother.

I was there to testify and tell the truth, and that was it.

One 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.

He and our father, and the other being my mother and I,

and that our agenda was to destroy our father's life,

to take his money, to take his house,

to ruin his career, his life, which wasn't the case.

In response to the prosecution,

Muhammad Altantawi's defense team

laid out their arguments in an attempt to introduce

reasonable doubt to the jury.

They pointed out that there was no way

of proving that the person in the window

was Muhammad, or even the size, age, or sex of the person

casting the shadow.

The defense also made the case that Muhammad was skinny,

and there was no way he could overpower his own mother, who

had been working out in a gym.

The defense attorney argued the timeline was too tight.

Nada's body fell at 5:53 in the morning,

the children woke up at 6:00.

Not enough time to commit the murder, to clean up the scene,

and to hide evidence.

On Monday, March 14, 2022,

after deliberating for only two hours,

the jury found Muhammad Altantawi

guilty of first-degree premeditated murder.

Six months later at sentencing,

Muhammad continued to declare his innocence.

Then came the victim impact

statements from Aya and Muhammad Altantawi's

father, Bassel.

He was trying to use everybody else's story

to gain sympathy, and he didn't even talk about how

he was sad about our mom.

He didn't talk about our mom at all.

As Bassel left the courtroom,

Aya followed him to the lobby to confront him.

I 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,

and I wouldn't have regretted it.

I don't think he understands why I felt that way.

I don't think he ever will understand

why I felt that way, because I don't

think he's capable of empathizing with anybody.

I don't think he's capable of thinking

about how other people could be affected from his actions.

It's sad for me to think about being related

to such pathetic people.

Muhammad was sentenced to 35 to 60 years

in prison, with the judge saying

he understood the consequences of his actions

and was deserving of such a stiff penalty.

I have not had any contact with my brother

since the trial or his sentencing ended.

Have I thought about it? Yes.

And the only reason that I would

talk to him, again, not because I want to

but because she was also his mother.

And I recognized that I am the only person who

would be able to offer him the opportunity for me

to go to her grave and have him be on the phone

and say whatever he would want to her.

And it doesn't mean that I like him,

that I love him, that I support him,

that I want anything to do with him,

that I want a relationship with him.

It means absolutely nothing other

than I'm presenting you with an opportunity

that I don't think anybody else would give you.

Since her mother's death in 2017

and the pain of the trial, Aya has committed herself

to helping other victims of crime

find justice for their loved ones.

My career plans are to go to law school,

become a criminal prosecutor, and

if somebody's going through something like domestic abuse

or whatever the case might be, when they feel like they can

relate to me or my mom or any part of anything

that we went through, I want people to know and see

that I might be biased, but I don't

think I turned out too terribly,

all things considered.

And your life isn't defined by what happens

to you, what people do to you.

Your life is what you want it to be, what you make of it,

and that's all that matters.

I remember my mom as somebody who was incredibly selfless

and kind and caring.

And she put everybody before her

and didn't want anybody to ever worry

about what she was going through

and didn't tell almost anybody what she was going through.

And I know she would want everybody

that she loved, everybody in her life to be happy

and to not dwell on what happened to her.

And it sucks that I don't have her,

but knowing that she can't be here anymore is--

that's enough for me.