Original subtitles

She was one who had to come downstairs

and find her mother bleeding, you know, dying on the floor.

That's a trauma that she'll never be able to get rid of.

We don't know where the weapon is in this case.

It wasn't at the scene.

It would need to be a weapon of some substance.

Tonight, a new search and new information

on a possible hate crime.

There's an awful lot of pressure that's coming. You have the media.

And of course, the media is gonna be paying particular attention

to this because it has blood and violence in it.

Police are under pressure to make something happen,

and they need to arrest somebody.

They need to announce that they've got leads.

They've struck once. They may do it again.

And staging the crime as a hate crime

would take the focus off the immediate family members.

As soon as you determine that there was no forced entry

but there's that broken window to give that impression,

well, then you have to start looking at,

"Wait a minute, something's wrong."

Significant other is always,

always, always the number one suspect. Period.

We have the husband now pointing the finger at the daughter.

Once you know that you're accused of a murder,

the first thing you want to do is further misdirect the police

to go into another direction.

Now he's caught in a lie. So what else is he lying about?

I think anyone that stages a crime to create public outcry

or discord deserves a special place.

Shaima and Kassim fled Iraq due to an uprising. They came to the US,

and they found a very welcoming Middle Eastern community

called El Cajon, in California.

And, you know, they really wanted to start this new life.

I have asked many clients,

"Why do Middle Eastern people come to El Cajon?"

The most substantive response I've gotten is that it's a lot like

their hometowns in places like Iraq

and other Middle Eastern locations.

Right away, Shaima really made an impression on the community.

She made tons of friends.

She was someone that people always wanted around.

She was, you know, really a staple in that community very quickly.

He and his wife met in a refugee camp,

when she was, like, 13 or 14, very, very young.

Shaima was particularly close with her teenage daughter, Fatima.

They had a really special bond.

And Fatima often referred to her mom as her best friend.

Fatima is a very strong,

very independent-thinking,

Americanized child of Middle Eastern parents

that grew up in what I would call a very severe environment.

Because Shaima was such a bright light,

such a warm, approachable person,

no one ever would have thought that something this heinous

would happen to someone like her.

Fatima was upstairs in the home getting ready for her day.

She comes down the stairs and was absolutely shocked

to see her mother lying bleeding on the floor.

She couldn't believe what she was seeing.

To walk down and see your mother in that state...

...she probably went into a complete state of shock.

She probably couldn't even comprehend what she was looking at.

I found her on the floor, drowned in her own blood.

So Fatima made an emergency call, and first responders came

and found the body of her mother, who had been beaten.

And there was a note next to her.

Saying, "Go back to your country, terrorist."

And because that was near her mother,

it was right away viewed as a hate crime.

Based on the contents of this note, we are not ruling out

the possibility this may be a hate crime.

I do a lot of work in El Cajon,

so it caught my attention right away.

And then not long after, I got a call,

and we spoke for a minute or two.

I don't remember what we spoke about,

but at some point I went,

"Are you the daughter in that case?"

And she said, "Yes." And I think we both started crying.

I mean, it was a very sad moment.

Hate crimes are very sensitive things to investigate.

They involve community tensions.

Sometimes communities don't believe

the police investigate hate crime properly.

Witnesses may not want to come forward because it's complicated.

So in a certain sense,

it was quite a credible thing, because of their Iraqi background,

that this could be the explanation for this case.

And in fact, that is how the police treated the case initially.

When they get to the scene and we see there's

potential forced entry and then the note...

The note itself is really not consistent

with what we would find in a, quote, "hate crime".

Really, in a hate crime,

they're not just punishing this particular person.

What they want to do in a hate crime is advertise to everybody else

that this in fact happened.

So just leaving a note is not it.

They would do something else far bigger than that,

to use this death as a warning to everybody else.

This appears to be targeted,

that they're looking at this one particular person,

not Muslims in general.

Once the news became public in the community

that this could be a hate crime,

it was terrifying for everyone,

you know, because it's such a tight knit Middle Eastern community.

They all felt that, you know,

"This is something that could happen to me, too.

If it could happen to her, why not me?

My family, my neighbour."

You know, it instilled a horrible amount of fear into everyone.

And, what could happen next?

They don't know who did this.

They don't know if it's internal

or somebody just came in from the outside.

They won't have any idea what they should do to protect themselves.

Any time you commit a crime on a victim

that shares a characteristic,

like being Middle Eastern or being gay,

statutorily they can prosecute you for a hate crime,

and the penalties are much higher.

It's considered to be a more serious crime.

Because this was a crime that seems to be a hate crime,

it was picked up by media all over the place, not just local media,

but, you know, major national outlets were talking about this.

So the fact that it was garnering so much attention

put a really extra sense of pressure on the case

and pressure to solve it.

The suspect broke a glass door in the rear of the house

during the commission of the crime,

which El Cajon police say could be a hate crime.

But there is another reason this story

is pulling at the world's heartstrings.

Mohebi says it was well known that in coming to America from Iraq,

Alawadi hoped to build a bond between Muslims and Christians,

and she hoped she would have a safe haven here to do so.

Shaima's husband, Kassim,

became very vocal after the news

that this was a perceived hate crime,

appearing on camera, demanding answers,

making sure that everyone was aware

that they were looking for somebody who was capable of doing this.

And he, you know, really took that cause on

and was not afraid to let his voice be known.

And once the news,

you know, percolated throughout the community, people were coming out

and protesting. They were really wanting answers of what happened

and, "How are we going to be protected?

So it became a big moment

for the police department to start searching for answers.

Alawadi's 17-year-old daughter, Fatima,

finds her mother in a pool of blood on the dining room floor.

She says her mother had been hit repeatedly in the head

with a tyre iron.

The first thing that investigators need to do is examine the scene

and see if there are any fingerprints,

anything forensic that can be traced back

to someone who's in the system already.

The investigator would then speak to the family of the victim to see,

did they have any enemies?

Had they been threatened?

Had they encountered anyone suspicious

or seen anything suspicious recently?

The crime scene processors are gonna be looking

for physical evidence. Anything that the perpetrator might

have left behind. And also anything that indicates

that this is NOT the kind of crime it looks like.

One of the things they discover is that the glass door

was broken in a way that had to have been done from inside.

It looked like the glass was shattered out into the yard, not in.

Kassim's account is that there was an intruder, there was a break in,

and that they smashed a window in his glass door in his house.

Glass breaks in kind of two ways.

It breaks into concentric rings and radial lines.

And if you examine the edges of that glass,

you can tell which direction the force came from.

This does not suggest forced entry or a break in or intruders.

It suggests something else.

As soon as you determine that there was no forced entry

but there's that broken window to give that impression, well,

then you have to start looking at, "Wait a minute, something's wrong."

Whoever did this was already inside the house.

And that was added to distract the police.

Now again, when you break a window in an occupied residence,

what you're doing is you're alerting the resident.

So someone who's coming in to do something to the resident

might not want to make all that noise.

So you have to take all that into consideration.

The fact that such a violent and bloody scene happened

and no one heard anything

points to the fact that she had to know her attacker.

And also, she was a very strict Muslim,

so she wore a hijab anytime she was out in public

or any time she would see someone.

She was not wearing that when she was found.

That further leads you to believe that she had been inside her house

with someone she was comfortable around.

Who is she comfortable around? Who has access to the home?

Her family.

The police eventually go through and took a look in her car.

And they find actual divorce papers. Well,

that immediately goes to the very top of the list of motive. Divorce.

Mom took out divorce papers.

I believe she presented them to the father.

And of course, that created some problems,

some tension, some passion.

In law enforcement circles,

significant other is always, always,

always the number one suspect. Period.

Every single case where that relationship exists.

So things began to emerge.

Police would then frame that as, "Well, why are there tensions?

Does it involve domestic violence? Does it involve other issues?"

And they would then start to investigate that.

But it provides a motive for her death

that is different from the hate crime motive.

The other tensions that were bubbling up

were the parents' desire

that Fatima marry her cousin,

who I believe lived in Iraq.

Fatima was not happy with that.

That created tension with her parents

and between the parents.

So there was a lot going on.

It wouldn't immediately just dismiss the hate crime motive.

As in many cases,

until a dominant theory of the crime emerges,

there will be parallel investigations

into different explanations.

But it would frame the crime in a very different way.

In the initial stages of this investigation,

the note was discovered very close to where the victim was found.

The note turns out to have been photocopied from a note

that had been left a few weeks earlier outside the door.

So who would have photocopied the note

rather than just written it originally?

And so there are suspicious elements to this that give them leads to

"Now we have to investigate this further."

When they find that the note was prepared

some time BEFORE the crime,

I think that would then make Kassim's actions look suspicious.

When the evidence points away from a hate crime

and the focus then turns toward the family,

the investigators' focus needs to be on ruling family members out.

So they would interview them,

and they would try to find corroborating information

to back up their story.

When we first interview a witness

that has experienced a traumatic event, you know,

we understand that we got to be cool and calm.

The problem is is it's imperative to get the information

as quickly as we can as to what they found.

El Cajon Police say they are investigating all aspects

of this case, including the possibility of a hate crime.

But they also say based on the evidence gathered so far,

they do believe this is an isolated incident.

Hate crimes are so vile that it would be hard to believe

someone in her own family would write an anti-Muslim note.

And also the fact that everything pointed

to this not being a hate crime

indicates that the crime was staged to appear like a hate crime.

And staging the crime as a hate crime

would take the focus off the immediate family members.

A problem that often arises

is that this person who staged the crime,

their emotions that they project when they speak to law enforcement

is often not in line with what one would expect emotions to be

when they find their loved one killed.

That whole area of psychology is pretty interesting.

I mean, there are people that kill people who cry real tears.

At a memorial service for Shaima Tuesday afternoon,

a plea from Shaima's husband, translated by her 15-year-old son.

What are you getting out of this,

and why did you do it?

This particular case,

when the husband is constantly going to the media

and reaffirming this hate crime

and trying to drum up support with the rest of the Muslim community,

to me, that's very important.

Going on camera and having a press conference

makes him look MORE like a victim in this case.

He's still trying to keep control over things.

It's one of the reasons he held a news conference.

He wanted to make sure everybody bought into his version of it.

He was so little considered to be the suspect

and so little considered to be a flight risk

that they "let him" take her body back to Iraq.

Police are under pressure to make something happen,

and they need to arrest somebody.

They need to announce that they've got leads,

that they have a productive plan in place

and something's going to happen to reassure people,

because otherwise it just looks like they don't know what they're doing

and everybody remains unsafe.

There's an awful lot of pressure that's coming.

It's pressure not only just to solve what's happening,

but you also have outside influences.

You have the media. And of course,

the media is going to be paying particular attention to this

because it has blood and violence in it.

And the remainder of the Muslim community,

they're going to be outraged as well.

They have to be assured that

the police aren't just brushing this away, they are treating it

with the necessary attention that it deserves.

He had been so involved

and been vocal, talking about it being a hate crime.

You know, how could he possibly be the one who was involved in this?

We do know that Shaima Alawadi was planning

to divorce her husband and move to Texas with her children.

Investigators Tuesday removed bags of evidence

as they executed a second search warrant on her Skyview Street home

in El Cajon, where the Iraqi mother of five was found

bludgeoned with a tyre iron last Wednesday morning.

The two immediate suspects are Kassim, the husband,

who might have known that his wife was about to divorce him...

...and Fatima, who apparently has some beef

with them wanting to put her into an arranged marriage.

And she does not want to do this.

So we have two people in the household

who already have motive for committing this murder.

And then you have to look at, OK,

out of these two people that we know that were there,

who's most likely to have committed the crime?

And then typically in interfamilial or domestic-type events,

it's usually the other spouse that's going to be suspect number one,

automatically.

There are videos of him at her coffin in Iraq

where he broke down...

very emotionally.

I don't know what the normal way to react to a death is,

even if you're the one that committed the killing.

So now they have two suspects.

They have to investigate both further.

It's possible the two of them were in on it together,

and that's something they also have to think about.

Fatima had a boyfriend. She did not want to have this arranged marriage.

And this boyfriend was seen with her around the time of the incident.

So her resistance to this arranged marriage gives her a motive

for why she might want her mother dead.

They have a note, so they might be able to compare handwriting.

That's one thing.

If they can find the implement that was used to either bludgeon Shaima

or break the door, so that's potentially a crowbar,

something like that, they can check it for who might have handled it.

They're going to be looking at any kind of computer

or digital record on phones, tablets, anything like that,

to see if somebody had planned this out in some way

or if there was any collusion between father and daughter on this.

All through their interviews,

even when they had all this information that kind of points

to the husband, the husband still maintains that he wasn't present.

And there's no other evidence to firmly establish

that he was there at that particular time.

So the police came up with a photograph that they doctored

to make it appear as if his car had been photographed

at another location nearby.

This use of false evidence,

which is totally legal in the United States,

can sometimes break down your offender when they realise,

"Uh-oh, my alibi isn't holding up."

The police, in a creative move,

confronted him with the picture...

that they said was taken from a nearby camera.

And the father actually did not park his car there,

but they confronted him with it,

and he cracked.

He made a mistake.

He knew that the cops had got him. Or at least he thought so.

And he made a very important admission that,

yes, he was, in fact, at the house.

Now he's caught in a lie.

So what else is he lying about?

That's an open door to start really putting pressure on him.

He might fess up to other things that give them leverage.

I'm outside the former home of Shaima Alawadi.

I spoke with her daughter's best friend today and she says the family

is not surprised to hear about today's arrest of Kassim Alhimidi.

Today,

the Iraqi man accused of killing his wife faced a judge.

Kassim Alhimidi appeared on video during his arraignment.

Not guilty

Arabic interpreter and a public defender were at his side.

His five children watched from the courtroom.

His daughter, Fatima, shown here today,

wept when she saw her father on the screen.

Once Kassim was arrested and charged for this crime,

that news was an absolute shock to the whole entire community.

They had all been so involved in trying to find this person.

It was unbelievable to everyone.

The Muslim community would be relieved to some degree

that this ISN'T a hate crime. It's not what it looked like.

That would make them very angry and doubly angry.

It isn't just about a failed domestic situation that's tragic.

It's about, "You used us

to try to make this look like something else.

And we want justice. Not just for the victim but for all of us."

Because the community had been so involved in solving this case

and demanding answers from the police department,

when Kassim was officially charged with this crime,

you know, the community really did want a sense of justice here.

They wanted him to be held responsible.

They wanted him to really apologise.

Much of the affidavit is centred on

the behaviour of Shaima's 17-year-old daughter, Fatima,

the only other person known to be in the home at the time of the attack.

She was evidently unhappy about an arranged marriage.

He points the finger at his daughter as the perpetrator

and tries to vilify her essentially and blame her for this.

That's now just tearing the family completely apart.

He hasn't allied with her in any way.

She's 17. She's forced to be alone to fight this out herself.

And she too, with a circumstantial case, it could be made against her.

The daughter, Fatima, changed her story.

And why the Muslim teen continued to lie about her Chaldean boyfriend

and her relationship with her mother.

I think you had two clear suspects.

We're not sure where they were at the time of the murder.

And they each have their own narrative.

Fatima, she knew her mother wanted to get a divorce,

and she knew that they had a contentious marriage.

So she has ammunition against her father.

And they're just clashing. One of them wants the other to go down.

And this is not how you think about families.

You have the offender, the husband,

now pointing the finger at the daughter.

That is not uncommon,

because once you know that you're accused of a murder,

the first thing you want to do is further misdirect the police

to go into another direction.

What a defence attorney needs is their own version of the events.

And part of the defence story has to be,

"If my client didn't do this, who else did?"

And if you can point to a probable suspect,

the prosecution's almost in a position

where they need to disprove that.

They need to show that there's sufficient evidence that

this person DIDN'T do it.

And in this case, the daughter would have been the only one

that could have broken the glass from the inside

and who could have also staged the scene.

Now blaming a crime on his daughter also makes some sense,

because the defence can put forward a motive for the daughter

to have killed the mother.

So anytime you can point the finger at someone else,

it's very helpful to the defence.

El Cajon Police Chief Jim Redman finally put to rest rumours

that had persisted for months, that the murder

of 32-year-old Shaima Alawadi was a hate crime.

Instead, he says, her husband, Kassim Alhimidi,

brutally beat her to death.

When he does plead not guilty and he's going to go to trial,

the trial sets off a major flurry of attention

throughout the whole entire country,

media outlets, the community.

Everyone wants to see the outcome of this trial

because they were already so heavily invested

in this potential hate crime that had occurred.

Tonight, a husband is behind bars,

charged with his wife's murder,

which was staged to look like a hate crime.

Alawadi's bloody body was found by her daughter, Fatima,

seen here talking to Ten News the day after the murder.

And standing beside her, the man now charged with his wife's murder,

Kassim Alhimidi. As you can see, he appears to be crying.

And within a couple of weeks,

here he is at his wife's funeral in Iraq, collapsing to the ground.

Mr Alawadi may have been offered a plea deal

that was not acceptable to him.

It is his constitutional right to have a trial by jury.

What he is saying by taking this case to trial is saying,

"You think I did this? Prove it

but prove it beyond a reasonable doubt."

Once the investigators believe they have enough evidence,

the case goes to the prosecutor for charging decisions,

and that can happen one of two ways.

One, by the prosecutor filing a legal document

that accuses him of the crime.

And the other way of doing it is by taking the case before a grand jury.

And interestingly, only the prosecutor

presents evidence before the grand jury.

We do not have a defence attorney in there to question any of it.

And the grand jury has to determine,

is there enough evidence here that we could send it to a jury

and a jury could reasonably believe that it was him?

Reasonable doubt means we don't have clear, direct physical evidence

that puts the murder weapon in this person's hand.

So what you have is circumstances, and the jury is going to decide

whether they have enough circumstances,

that this is way too much for coincidence,

somebody that this case is built against is definitely guilty.

So the defence is trying to poke a hole in that set of circumstances

and show you still haven't really proven anything.

Going to trial, he still believes

that he can get one over on the jury.

Kassim Alhimidi used a rolled up towel to silence his sobs

as his defence attorney made a final plea to jurors,

saying Alhimidi loved his wife and wouldn't kill her,

so much so that when he learned Shaima Alawadi,

the mother of his five children, was brain dead, he broke down.

He said, "Take my brain.

Take my brain and implant it in her.

I'll pay you any amount of money.

Save her life."

The jury would be confronted with a motive

which explains all of this evidence.

The motive needs to be credible, needs to be plausible,

and it needs to be convincing

so that they believe that is the explanation

for all these indirect pieces of evidence

that link to Kassim being the killer

and overcoming any gaps in the evidence,

for example, the absence of the weapon.

We don't know where the weapon is in this case.

It wasn't at the scene. It was never recovered.

But you can infer what that weapon might be.

The pathologist described the injuries as blunt trauma injuries.

So he or she was distinguishing those injuries

from lacerations from a knife or a sharp object, from a gunshot.

It is also likely that the pathologist would have indicated

how heavy the weapon was.

It would need to be a weapon of some substance. Now,

why would the pathologist know that?

By examining the wound, the shape of the wound,

the length of the wound, the damage to the skin or bone,

whether these were cuts or bruises,

how deep the bruising went and so on and so forth. So,

it's something experienced forensic pathologists do all the time,

particularly when no weapon is recovered.

Even the prosecutor in this case says this is not a slam dunk.

No, it's not. And that's because mostly it's circumstantial.

The murder weapon was never found.

There was no blood evidence ever linking Kassim Alhimidi

to the murder of his wife

or linking him to that bizarre hate letter that was left near her body.

I believe that Kassim thought he had everything under control.

And as soon as he was a suspect, he found out he didn't.

And even during the trial,

he would have been still very heavily invested in the fact that

"people should believe me".

He believes a lot in the power of his own convictions

and he's a very strong presence.

And he continues to want people to hear his voice,

even though it's kind of over.

Now Kassim Alhimidi was wailing so loudly,

the judge had to call for a break, and at one point,

he just put his head down, dropped his arms and sobbed.

Testimony showed Shaima referred to her husband

as the actor for his manufactured emotions.

The family and the community really wanted to see Kassim pay

for what he did because, you know,

not only had he gotten the entire community involved

in trying to solve this hate crime, he had done this violent,

horrible crime to their beloved member of their community

and tried to lie about it on top of it.

It was like one blow after the other,

and people just really wanted to see him pay for that.

After the prosecution and defence have done all of their arguments

and admitted all of the evidence,

the case goes to the jury,

and the jury needs to determine beyond reasonable doubt,

did this person commit this crime?

Deliberations sometimes take a long time.

And if at the end of the first day of deliberations

the jury hasn't reached a verdict, they can continue the next day.

And if you have one person on that jury

who is not completely convinced

and they cannot be convinced by the other jurors,

it ends up in a hung jury, which means a mistrial.

So everyone has to be on the same page.

If convicted, Alhimidi could get 26 years to life in prison.

The jury will return here tomorrow morning to begin its deliberations.

It's not a quick verdict,

but it certainly didn't take that long for them to come back with it.

California, plaintiff, versus Kassim Alhimidi, defendant.

Guilty of the crime of murder.

Once the verdict comes in and it doesn't go his way,

he's going to explode...

...and insist that they're wrong.

He's innocent, and he just wants to die.

Wants it all over with. He can't even believe this happened.

The guilty verdict against Kassim Alhimidi

brought pandemonium to the courtroom.

His oldest son, Mohammad, began screaming in the gallery.

That's ...

Others joined in then, including the defendant.

Then a struggle as deputies hold

the younger Alhimidi out of the courtroom.

He was handcuffed in the hallway and arrested.

Tempers still high, though, as his younger brother,

on crutches, had to be restrained too.

I'm surprised at the sentence: 26 to life?

If I were Fatima I would think this was an inappropriate sentence.

He should be put away for life, for good.

He should never have the chance to get out.

If he does get out, HER life is in danger.

So I think she would be afraid.

But I think the community would believe that justice

HADN'T been served because he still has a shot at getting out.

And he shouldn't have that.

People that stage these things,

it's terribly manipulative, and honestly,

using the tension in that community

to shield yourself

from a murder that you committed,

I mean, it's very creative,

but it's a special kind of evil.

Trust me, even as a defence attorney,

I don't like bad people.

In a community like the one in El Cajon where, you know,

the majority of the community is Middle Eastern,

something like a hate crime is a very intense, serious thing.

It's not something to be taken lightly.

And it sets a level of fear that is unlike a regular crime.

And this community was rattled by this.

It instilled so much fear in them

that even after Kassim was sentenced,

they still carried that fear with them,

and it reverberated for years after.

And now Fatima and her two brothers

have to grow up without either parent. You know,

one of them killed and the other one serving essentially life in prison,

over a senseless crime...

that should have never happened.

And Fatima, the one who had to come downstairs

and find her mother bleeding,

you know, dying on the floor,

that's something that she will have to cope with

and carry for the rest of her life. That's a trauma

that she'll never be able to get rid of,

and that's a horrible thing.

I think it's clear this wasn't just a reactive crime.

He had planned it.

The note showed up a few weeks before.

He had staged it in a way that riled up the community.

He did a bad job, but he still had premeditation.

And it wasn't a heat-of-the-moment kind of murder.

And that's why I'm surprised at the sentence.

The unbelievably deep harm

that it has caused to so many people.

I think anyone that stages a crime

to create public outcry

or foment discord

deserves a special place,

because it certainly harms...

I would even use the word "traumatises",

a huge number of people.

You can barely imagine what it must be like

for those children to see their father, who they love and trusted,

who they believed was fighting to find their mother's killer,

was actually the one who was behind it all along.

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