A Texas man, sought by police for 12 years, was convicted on Tuesday of murdering his teenage daughters and sentenced to life without parole, prosecutors said.
Yasser Said, 65, spent nearly six of the 12 years following the murders on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list on January 1, 2008, before Justin was found in an apartment in the Fort Worth suburb of Fort Worth.
The Dallas County District Attorney’s Office said a jury convicted him of death Tuesday for murdering the daughters of 17-year-old Sarah Said and 18-year-old Amina Said.
Said not only abused the family and killed his own daughters, but he also “brainwashed” his adult son, who is serving a 10 year prison sentence for helping to shelter him, the girls’ mother, Patricia Owens said in court on Tuesday.
According to the video for NBC Dallas-Fort Worth, Owens said, “That means you’re watching me — I’m not afraid of you anymore.”
The girls were found dead in their father’s taxi outside a hotel in Irving, a downtown Dallas-Fort Worth area, officials said.
“Help! My dad shot me!” The district attorney’s office said Sarah Said told the 911 dispatcher that night.
NBC Dallas-Fort Worth reported that Yasser Said was “obsessed with possession and control” and would not let his daughters date or go to the movies, prosecutor Lauren Black told jurors.
“While this ruling does not bring Sarah and Amina back, my office and this jury have done everything in our power to see that justice is done,” Dallas County District Attorney John Cruzot said in a statement Tuesday.
Said, a naturalized US citizen who was born in Egypt denied killing his daughters. He said he was upset that the girls were leaving home a week ago with their mother and their boyfriend on their way to Oklahoma, but they didn’t kill them.
“I was upset because it’s something to be upset about in my culture,” he said.
He said that he thought someone was following him and left the girls who knew how to drive.
Saeed was arrested in August 2020 at Justin’s house.
Sayeed’s son and brother were accused of helping him escape capture after the murders.
The Justice Department has said that his son, Islam Saeed, was sentenced last year to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to three federal counts that involved concealing a man from arrest and obstructing official proceedings.
The brother, Yasin Saeed, was sentenced to 12 years in prison last year after he was found guilty of the same charge.
Federal prosecutors have said that a maintenance worker identified her in 2017, and they were involved in sheltering her at the home in Justin for as long as Yasser Said was in an apartment in Bedford, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.