The family of a Texas cab driver suspected of murdering his two teenage daughters over a decade ago was supposedly enraged they dated non-Muslim men and he would not raise “whores as daughters.”
63-year old Yaser Abdel Said of Lewisville was taken into police custody on Wednesday after spending over 12 years on the FBI’s list of “Top Ten” most-wanted fugitives.
Patricia “Tissie” Owens, the suspect’s wife, told Fox News her better half became troubled after discovering his daughters, Amina, 18, and Sarah, 17, began dabbling in dating non-Muslims. Owens disclosed some rare particulars about their murder, as well as Said’s run from the law in an interview on a Fox Nation special called “A Question of Honor.”
Owens explained her family was spending New Year’s Day together in 2008 when her husband asked the girls to dinner.
“I told him I wanted to go with him,” she said to Fox. “He said ‘No, I just want to talk to the girls and we’ll be back in a little bit.’ I didn’t think anything of it,” the visibly shaken mother described to Fox’s Gregg Jarrett.
Said let Owens know that he would be eating with their two girls at a local Denny’s, she says, but they never made it to the restaurant. The fanatical father drove his daughters to Irving, Texas instead, where it is said he shot both of them inside his car in what his wife said were “honor killings.”
Owens waited at home for her family to come back, but to her horror local police arrived at her door instead, she recalled.
“They said they got a 911 tip of a female saying she had been shot and the phone is registered to this address, and I told them that my daughters were with their dad and they were going to a Denny’s.”
Trying in vain to contact her husband, Owens got in touch with his brother and begged for information about what happened to her family.
“He said he didn’t know,” she said, “but he said Yaser didn’t want to raise whores as daughters.”
While Said was a fugitive of the law, Owens and her eldest son, Islam, moved in with his father’s family. Owens said those two months made her realize that some of Said’s siblings both knew he murdered his daughters, and also defended his supposed reasons for the crime.
“Just hearing them talk and being around them the months that I was, I picked up on things,” she told Fox. “One of his brothers told me that I was really lucky that he [Said] left their bodies for me to find, for me to put my girls to rest. If it was him nobody would find his girls.”
Said was finally found and arrested by an FBI SWAT Team on Wednesday in Justin, Texas, only 22 miles west of Lewisville. He was taken into custody peacefully.
Said’s brother and a nephew were also detained on federal charges of harboring a fugitive, according to FOX 4. The report states the FBI suspects there are more people who assisted Said in avoiding capture for 12 years.
Said’s son Islam eventually relocated to his father’s birthplace of Egypt. Owens told Fox that Islam still insists that his father is innocent of killing his sisters.
“He did tell me that they did not deserve to have their headstones because they were dating Mexicans and anybody that dates out of their culture, they don’t deserve to have anything,” she said.
With her estranged husband in jail on charges of capital murder, Owens says she wants some long awaited “justice” for her girls.
“All I can say is, there’s going to be justice,” she told the Dallas Morning News. “My daughters were loving, caring, smart, loved everybody, would help anybody,” she said. “They were two of the most awesome kids in the world, and they did not deserve what happened to them.”