The Shadow in the Window
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the power of purposeful play. Visit legoeducation.com slash rebuildtheworld. Tonight on Dateline. I look out the window and I see my mom's body on the ground. I remember screaming, but I didn't realize it was coming from me. Your mom fell? I got a phone call. Nada's dead. One of the questions was, has your mother ever tried to kill herself? We know that somebody was there when it happened.

The video showed a shadow figure lifting this body up. My brain first went to the husband. I remember hearing the shower in my brother's room running, which was really strange. I don't want to say anything about my sister-in-law. She was awake before me. That's all I have to say. Somebody killed her, left no evidence, and got away with something. I started yelling and screaming. You are absolutely nothing! No remorse, no empathy for anyone else.

none of it felt real. A dead woman on the ground, an open window above. Was it an accident, suicide, or murder? I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline. Here's Keith Morrison with The Shadow in the Window.

The sun was barely up when the girl called 911. We need an ambulance. Oh my God. A police officer turned on his siren and accelerated past the early morning traffic to reach her, then took a left into what seemed like another world. All around the narrow road was still, quiet, and green like the color of money. No hint of trouble here. And then he spotted the girl.

That's her running as fast as she can toward the terrible thing at her home. The thing she needed him to see. "Where's she at?" Her name is Aya Altentawi. She is in her 20s now. The crime that ended her childhood was years ago. But discovering what happened while she was sleeping, that has filled up all those years and forced her to make hard choices about what it means to survive.

What's it like to sit here and talk about these last few years of your life? I don't know. I mean, a lot of it doesn't feel like I'm talking about my life. It just feels like I'm talking about someone's life. Like you're looking in from the outside on somebody else. Exactly. It's a little strange, but... Well, you're smiling. Behind her smile, there's grief, of course, and anger. So much anger. We'll get to that. Do you want to start with that particular early morning? Yeah, we can do that.

It was my first day of my second week of high school. August 2017. 14-year-old Aya had big plans for her sophomore year. I wanted to do some sort of makeup. You know, we're back to school. Everybody is either a little bit tanner or did something different to their hair. So for me it was, let me try to learn how to do my makeup. Let me do a little bit of mascara, a little bit of blush.

She lived in Farmington Hills, a well-heeled suburb northwest of Detroit, with her mom, Nada, and two siblings, a younger sister and an older brother. They had a morning routine that was almost military. Alarms at 6 a.m., Mom Nada would check that everyone was up in the car by 6.30. It was, if you're not on time, you're getting left behind. But that morning, Nada did not come to ensure Aya was up.

And it was getting late. I got up, got myself ready, sat on my bed, and the house was still completely silent. And I was like, okay, this is kind of strange. You should know this about the family's home. It's a sprawling 10,000 square foot mansion, easy to get lost in. But the quiet that morning, that wasn't normal. So Aya went to look for her mom. First she walked down the hall to her younger sister's room.

She was still fast asleep. There was no sign of her mother. She wasn't in the guest bedroom either, or the kitchen downstairs, or the garage. And that's when Aya had a horrifying thought. And then I was like, okay, well, the window in the guest bedroom was open. I mean, I don't think she would have fallen out, but maybe she did. She rushed back upstairs to that open window, and she looked down. And I remember screaming, but it...

She was screaming at the sight of her mother, lying face up on the patio, still in her pajamas and not moving.

Aya ran to her older brother Muhammad's room. I told him mom was outside and I started running downstairs. He was following me and I called 911. What's going on there? I don't know. We were waiting for school so I went to find my mom. Then I looked out the window because it was open and it was never open. And she fell. Your mom fell? My two stories, yeah. Is she breathing? I'm not sure if she's breathing.

I don't know. Aya handed the phone to her brother so the dispatcher could talk him through CPR. One, two, three, four, five, six. Aya ran down the driveway to flag down that police car and then the paramedics, and she and Muhammad tried to tell them what they knew. So I saw the window was open and it wasn't, but they were cleaning supplies and I noticed them was doing something in the morning to make it early.

Sure enough, police photos show a stepladder in the guest bedroom and streaks of cleaning fluid on the windowpane. And on the ground next to Nada was a wet towel. Had she fallen while cleaning the windows? Or was it something else? One of the questions was, has your mother ever tried to kill herself? Or was she ever suicidal, depressed, that sort of thing? And I immediately was like, no, she hasn't. And my brother was like, no, actually she has.

Muhammad said their mother had tried to overdose on pills a few years before. Aya's head was spinning. She knew nothing about this. And then suddenly her dad was at the house. There he is, falling to his knees at the news. The rest of the day was a blur. The ambulance left with her mother. Calls started coming in from family.

And then I was also getting calls from people in the community already, like, "Is everything okay? Do you need anything?" It's chaos. With my dad. It was all over the place. And you're 14. I was 14. What Aya didn't know yet was that the ambulance wasn't taking her mother to the hospital, but to the office of the medical examiner, because her mother was dead.

Adaya's journey was just beginning. None of it felt real. Like, none of it felt real. But it was real. Real the way a shadow is real when it exposes what lies behind. An open window. That was her first clue something was wrong. And then two floors below, her mom lying so still on the patio.

Aya didn't know if she'd fallen out or jumped. What she did know, finally, was that her 35-year-old mom was dead. My dad was on the phone with his mom and he was talking in Arabic. He was whispering and he said, "Nada's dead. Like, she's dead." It doesn't matter how old you are when it happens to you, becoming a motherless child is a difficult passage. Aya felt so alone. Her mom's family so far away.

Nada had been born on the other side of the world, in Syria. That's where she'd met Aya's dad, Dr. Basil Altantawi. After they moved to the U.S., he opened an urgent care clinic. They were both devout Muslims, steadfast members of their local mosque. My mom was a lot more extroverted, loved going to events, that sort of thing. My dad was...

Had to drag him out of the house to go to an event. Her parents separated in 2016 and her dad moved out of the house. So it was Nada who did most of the parenting, usually with that big smile she had. I wish we had a lot more time together because the time that we had towards the end wasn't always the best just because I was a teenager. I wanted my privacy. I was getting to the age where hanging out with your mom isn't cool anymore. What was the last thing you ever said to her or she to you? That's a sad one.

My mom asked me to spend the night in her room and she hadn't done that in years. So I was like, "No, I have school tomorrow. I'm gonna go to my room." And she's like, "No, like, come on, just spend the night in my room." She asked me three times and each time I said no. And I remember in my head, I was like, "Okay, if she asked me a fourth time, I'll say yeah." She didn't ask me a fourth time. Do you wonder sometimes what would have happened had you stayed in her room with her? Yeah. But what did happen?

As Farmington Hills Police investigators began pondering that, they got phone calls from Nada's friends, friends who clearly adored her. She would walk into class happy with a smile on her face. Deanie and Susie, who asked that we not use their last names for privacy reasons, knew Nada from their gym, the Franklin Athletic Club. They had first met her nearly 10 years before when she joined their Zumba class.

What was she like? Oh, my God. Sweet, loving, happy. Dini was getting ready for exercise class when she got word Nada was dead. And I was like, what? What do you mean Nada's dead? I mean, I was crying for weeks and weeks after this happened because she was such a sweetheart. The morning after Nada's death, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Lubosha Dragovich and his team set out to find some answers.

Dr. Dragovich assigned one of his doctors to do an initial autopsy. The photographs were projected on the screen in the conference room, and our colleague started reporting on the case and said, I believe that she died from those injuries that she sustained. In other words, Nada died because she fell or jumped out the window. But the longer Dr. Dragovich looked at those photos, the more something bothered him.

No bleeding on her brain, either, or from scrapes on her elbow and leg, which could mean only one thing.

Nada's heart must have stopped pumping before she went out the window. She didn't jump or die from an accidental fall. She was already dead by then. The enigma here was actually how she came to her death. So back to the lab he went to run more tests. And back went the detectives to Nada's house. They didn't find any signs of struggle there, but a tipster had told them something.

The house had six security cameras, and Nada kept them rolling at all times. The investigators began scrolling through hours and hours of footage, looking for whatever, maybe nothing. But they did see something, something very strange, and it changed everything. I said, God, this cannot be.

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They could only hope, of course, to detectives, that they'd see something helpful on the security video. There were six cameras after all. Hours and hours of flickering footage from the house where Nada died. But not one of them was focused on the guest bedroom. Except, look at this. There was a camera pointed down toward the patio. And just before 5.55 a.m., Nada's body suddenly grotesquely fell through the frame. Detectives watched the video again.

And this time they noticed something else. On the left side of the screen, a light in the guest bedroom had created shadows on the grass outside. A grisly shadow play of what looked like a person moving at the window, lifting something. What was your sort of reaction in the moment? Your reaction?

What did you think? I said, God, this cannot be. You see the lifeless body being disposed over the windowsill with some push propelling over. Somebody seemed to be struggling to get that over the edge of the window. Well, obviously, because that body is dead weight. But who cast that shadow? Who shoved Nada out the window? Nada's friends said it was obvious to them.

My brain first went to the husband. I mean, with all I knew. Yeah, we all did. Nada's soon-to-be ex-husband, Dr. Basil Altantawi. But hang on a minute. Hadn't he fallen to his knees when police told him about Nada's death overcome by grief? Maybe. But what was also true, Aya's parents were in the grip of a bitter divorce. Nada had been so young when they got married, 11 years younger than Basil.

But as the kids got older, said Aya, her mom chafed against her father's control. She wasn't really being submissive anymore. She wasn't being like, yeah, I'll do whatever you want. Nada wanted her freedom, Aya told us, starting with a job.

She's like, I'm going to be a personal trainer. This is what I want to do. He absolutely lost it. Why would he lose it over that? Because she's getting a job. Because she's getting a job at a place where men and women worked together. Bickering turned into physical fights, said Aya. On Valentine's Day, 18 months before her mom died, Aya was woken up by her parents yelling. She went to see what was going on.

Basil had grabbed Nada's phone. My dad, at this point, he's in his room trying to close the door, and my mom's outside of the room, and her hand was between the crack of the door and the wall, and my dad slammed the door and closed on her hand. Ouch. Yeah, really painful. Aya called the police, and her dad was arrested on a domestic violence charge. He later pleaded no contest.

A judge put him on probation and ordered him to keep away from Nada. And she filed for divorce, took that job as a fitness instructor, and consulted this man, Dr. Khaled Abu El-Fadl, a law professor and Islamic scholar. The question was, you know, I've been wearing the hijab for many years,

I've been covering my hair as a Muslim woman and I am wondering whether it's a sin to take off the veil. The professor's counsel? She wouldn't be a bad Muslim either way. I don't know of too many Muslims who believe that not covering your hair is equal to apostasy. That's just a very extreme position. Nada decided to stop covering her hair. Basil didn't like it one bit.

Was she afraid of her situation? Did she express that fear to you? She definitely described her family life as oppressive, but she didn't say anything that gave me the sense that she would be putting her life at risk if she decides to take on the veil. And the divorce dragged on. Nada started seeing another trainer at the gym.

And Basil had other troubles. A criminal investigation into his urgent care clinic. He ended up pleading guilty to felony health insurance fraud. Paid a hefty fine. Lost his medical license. When he showed up the morning of her mother's murder, it was the first time Aya had seen him in more than a year. The first thing he says to me is, Aya, what are you wearing? You're going to go to hell if you keep dressing like that. That night, Basil stayed with the kids at the house. Aya said she locked herself in her bedroom.

Got up the next morning and went to school to get away from him. How'd you deal with being in school? How'd you concentrate on anything? Oh, I didn't. I sat in my guidance counselor's office the whole day. What were you afraid he would do to you? Hurt me physically. I mean, I'd seen what he'd done to my mom. So, was the shadowy presence throwing Nada out the window? I as dad? It must have been. Except, it couldn't have been.

There's a place Aya can go to feel a moment of peace and calm, something she loved to do as a child. When I'm horse riding, I don't think about anything else besides me and the horse. It's therapeutic to me. Here is where the chaos stops. The memories, the questions. Aya had so many of those, mostly about her father and whether he could possibly be her mother's killer. Suffice to say, there's an awful lot of rage in that relationship. Yeah.

Well, no. Aya's dad had an ironclad alibi. While on probation for that domestic violence charge, Basil had to wear a tracking device, which showed he was miles away. There was no way he could have been the shadow in the window, which meant...what? Sir, what you gonna do, sir? Again, we're sorry about your loss. I'm sure it's tough.

The day after the murder, Aya's brother, 16-year-old Muhammad, sat with detectives at the dining room table. Basil had run an errand, but asked his son to help detectives figure things out. Would you know if somebody came over to the house last night? I should, yeah. I mean, would there be like a door chime or anything like that? Yeah. The thing is, on Sunday, I had a pretty bad ear infection, so I couldn't really hear from one ear. Muhammad said the first time he knew something was wrong,

was when he heard his sister yelling at his bedroom door. Detectives told Mohammed they were puzzling over something. That security camera video showing someone had been in the room with Nada?

Far as anyone knew, Muhammad and his two sisters were the only other people in the house. Somebody was there. I know that. It's on video. So we know that somebody was there when it happened. I don't want to say anything about my sister, but I mean, if it comes down to it, then yeah, she was awake before me. That's all I have to say. But Aya had long hair. Investigators thought the person in the video had short hair, hair like Muhammad.

Mohammed told his story again, but the detectives didn't seem satisfied.

I mean, now's the time if we're gonna be honest about it, we gotta be honest about it now. And gradually his story started to change. He said he did see his mom that morning after all. I saw her walking upstairs with some stuff and she said to go get a spray bottle. And I brought her that and I just, that's it, I left. I can tell by the way, you're gonna feel a lot better so we can get this explained out if it's an accident.

Is that what happened? It's my mom's life, man. Just tell us. You've gone this far, bud. Finally, Muhammad told investigators, yes, he'd been in the room, that he'd held the ladder for his mom so she could clean the windows, and she slipped, and he tried to grab her foot, but it was too late. I looked down at that one, and

Except, remember the medical examiner said there was no accidental fall. Nada was dead before she went out the window. But before the detectives could ask Muhammad about that...

Basil walked in and stopped the interview. That's when detectives took them all to the police station. Aya and her sister in one car, Muhammad in another car. Did that mean anything to you? I thought it was just routine. They had questions they needed answered down at the station kind of thing. But there was nothing routine about this.

Ayat didn't know it, but some of her mom's friends had been talking to the police about Muhammad. She said that Muhammad felt that everything that went wrong in the family, everything was all because of her. Blamed for everything. And the more Americanized she became, the worse it got. Yeah. And Susie remembered something Nada said the last time they saw each other. I will always have my daughters, but to my son, I'm dead.

I have found out what happened next, not from police, but in a text from a school friend. And they're like, do you believe your brother actually did it? And I was like, what do you mean, do I believe my brother did it? And they're like, oh my God, I'm so sorry, you didn't see the news, they're charging your brother. Muhammad had been arrested for the murder of their mother. I was like, oh, okay. Wait a minute, you didn't just go, oh, okay. In my head I did. I was like, oh, I mean, it's out of my control. What am I supposed to do about it?

How could a 14-year-old absorb such a thing? Muhammad, the first person she'd run to for help that morning, her own brother. Could he really be their mother's killer? She didn't want to believe it. Couldn't even think it. All she knew was she had to survive. So she made a decision to toughen up. It's a very charming wall that you build around yourself, but it's impregnable. I can see that. Unless you want it to open up. Exactly. Exactly.

It would be years before that happened. And years before a jury would get a look at the shadowy figure in that video. What would they see? You can't make out the sex, the size, the age of anyone in a shadow.

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For comprehensive identity theft protection, there's LifeLock. LifeLock alerts you to more uses of your personal info and fixes identity theft issues that arise. Start protecting your identity today with a 30-day free trial at LifeLock.com slash special offer. Muhammad Al-Tantawi, just 16 years old, arrested for the murder of his own mother. It just didn't compute in my brain that a child could kill his mother.

We were all horrified. We were absolutely horrified. Muhammad's dad hired veteran attorney Michael Sciano to defend his son. I don't believe Muhammad did this. He thought the cops had a bunch of shadows, and that was about it. That's a shadow being reflected off the house onto the left side of the screen here. You can't make out the sex, the size, the age of anyone in a shadow.

Anyway, look at the kid, said Sciano. He was, I would say, a very skinny, I would almost call him frail at the time, 16-year-old. Too weak to overpower his mother. He'd been injured in a car accident a couple years previous, fractured vertebrae, smashed breastbone, etc., etc. Besides, the timeline was too tight. Not enough time to commit a murder and hide any evidence.

Remember, the kids were supposed to get up to go to school at 6 o'clock. This woman went out the window at 5:55. Having this whole house cleaned up all within a five-minute period of time, a 15 or 16-year-old boy being able to accomplish that, that's pretty funny. Anybody being able to accomplish that and get out of the house and get out of the property? Correct. I mean, how? Correct. But it was Muhammad's interview at the dining room table that the defense attorneys really took issue with. You're going to feel a lot better.

This, said Sciano, had all the hallmarks of a false confession. I mean, you have three officers surrounding him at a table. When you feed someone that young a story like that, they're going to appease the older person. Sciano was determined that no jury should ever hear that interview.

So, before the trial even began, he appealed it all the way to the Michigan Supreme Court, until finally the prosecutors agreed not to use it as evidence. It was a huge win, but it took years, years that were very hard on Aya. Every year or so,

It would be like, "Oh, the trial's starting on this date." And then we'd reach that date and they'd be like, "Oh, actually, it got pushed another year or something." So then I'd have to wait even longer to know how did she die, who was involved. Aya's life had been transformed. No more big house in Farmington Hills. She chose to go into foster care rather than live with her dad. He was like, "Aya, if you come live with me, like, I'll buy you horses." And I was like, "Okay."

I'm not doing that. Aya still suspected that her dad was involved in the murder somehow. And she clung to the hope that maybe her brother was innocent. I just want to continue to give him the benefit of the doubt because if I believe that he did it, then that would have meant that I lost my mom, I lost my brother, I lost my dad. The trial finally began in March 2022, five years after Nada's murder.

Lead detective Richard Webby told the jury the crime scene had been staged. I saw the Tilex there and I thought that that was very odd. I've never seen or heard of anybody cleaning windows with Tilex. Then it was time for the centerpiece of the prosecution's case, that security video. It appears to be a head covered in short hair. The witnesses at the time advised that the only male in the house, the only person with short hair, was the defendant.

And there was more on that security tape to consider. Muhammad giving his mother CPR. He was very half-hearted. At some point during the time where he's still counting out loud to the dispatcher, the defendant stopped giving CPR altogether. He was just counting. One, two, three, four. Fake CPR? Muhammad knew there was no point because he had killed her, the prosecutor said.

The medical examiner said he figured out how. The findings in the lungs were characteristic of naso-oral blockage. Somebody putting a pillow over the face or a cloth or suffocation, in other words. You can think of various things. Including that wet towel police saw and smelled beside Nada's body. Evidence texts reported as...

smelling like naphthalene or something to that nature. Some kind of chemical? Some kind of chemical. A chemical that maybe knocked Nada out cold. But would a jury really believe that a son could do such a thing to his own mother? Well, look at his phone, the prosecutor said. His contact name for Nada was Dog. That was his name for his mom in his contacts.

That phone, said the prosecutor, also revealed motive. On it was a text Nada sent her son a few weeks before her death. It was about the divorce. Nada was set to give a deposition any day. She warned Mohammed her lawyer was asking about, quote, criminal things that will send your dad to prison if I said anything. The prosecutor said it was clear Mohammed killed his mom to protect his dad.

There was one more thing police found on Muhammad's phone, and it was perhaps the most suspicious piece of evidence in the entire case.

Pictures he'd snapped just a few weeks before the murder. There were photographs of the same window from which her body was dropped out of on August 21st. Proof, prosecutors said, that Muhammad had been plotting the murder for weeks. I heard none of this because she was a witness in the case, about to see her brother for the first time in years.

And yet it wasn't him, it would be her father who sent her carefully constructed protective walls crashing down. The wait for her brother's trial had seemed endless, something to endure.

I mean, I would definitely have moments where I'd be really upset with everything, but for the most part, I was just, I was numb to it because I knew if I let my grief take over, then I, like, I just wouldn't be able to function. Why is it that I get the feeling, I've had the feeling the entire time we've been talking, that one poke too many through that protective layer of yours and there's a very wounded soul inside? Because at the end of the day, I'm still human. There's only so much I can take.

With Muhammad in jail awaiting his trial, Aya hadn't seen him or spoken to him. She hoped still that he was innocent, but she told the prosecutor she'd testify about what she knew, about what she had seen. When the divorce case started, he was very against it because he kind of saw it as my mother was trying to take revenge.

Then, just a week before the murder, Iya testified, Nada told Muhammad he could move in with his dad. And my brother basically just responded, it doesn't matter, you...

already did this, like you're going to get what's coming to you. Such a throwaway remark. And yet, the prosecutor argued, here was more proof Muhammad had planned to kill his mother. Give her what was coming. Not so fast, said Muhammad's defense attorney. There's not one report of that in any police report. So Muhammad said this to his mother? Right. So you thought she made it up? Absolutely, 100%.

On cross-examination, the attorney confronted Aya with her statements to police all those years ago, which painted a very different picture of her brother. At the time, Muhammad rushed to help his mother when she was choking on some food. Hardly the behavior of a son who wanted to kill his mother, said the defense. He was the one that came to her assistance at that time, right? That's what you told the police, at least? That's what I told the police, and yes, I don't remember the exact details of the event.

And then came the crux of the defense case: the complete lack of evidence connecting Muhammad to the crime. The defense argued he couldn't be identified in the security camera video, and the footage of him doing CPR? That proved nothing.

If he's going to just be faking it, why not just sit there and 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4. No, you see him actually pushing down. But would you agree that he was a little too calm, a little not quite frantic enough for what he was supposed to do? I think if you listen to his voice, it sounds very frantic. As for motive, the prosecution alleged Mohammed killed his mom to stop her spilling the beans on his dad at that upcoming divorce deposition. But read the whole text, said the defense attorney.

Nada had gone on to write, I did not open my mouth. I'm not going to say anything. I'm not going to say anything whatsoever. What's more, if you looked at the crime scene photos, you could see Muhammad's bags packed up and ready to go. The bottom line was,

Where was the animosity at that point? The defense attorney asked why police hadn't tried harder to find other possible suspects. It was not anything other than a casual relationship. Nada had been seeing a co-worker from the gym, who testified he snuck into the house more than once when the kids were sleeping. Well, so too could a potential killer, said the defense. Equally preposterous, according to the defense, was the prosecution's theory of the crime,

Lab tests found no chemical on the towel, so how could Muhammad have overpowered his mom, let alone hurled her body out of a window? What would you say to the defense lawyer's assertion, strongly, that your brother wasn't big enough? How could he get her out the window? I think when you're very determined to do something, little things like that aren't going to stop you.

Finally, after all the years of waiting, she saw the sum of the evidence against him and was convinced her brother was guilty. And after a quick deliberation, the jury was two. Six months later, Mohammed spoke to the court at his sentencing. I am innocent. I have never wavered, nor will ever waver in that truth.

Aya listened to her brother, and then to her father deliver a victim impact statement which barely mentioned her mother. It seemed to be all about defending Mohammed. He was a loving, and he's still a loving, caring, supportive human being. I mean, that was my breaking point, the sentencing. I absolutely lost it. Aya followed her father into the hallway. I started yelling at him. What a show.

Like his face was here and my face was here and I was just pointing my finger in his face. And I had like six, seven deputies holding me back. I had just had enough and all this pent up anger. They had absolutely no remorse, no empathy for anyone else in the situation but themselves. I mean, how are you human? Is it your belief that your father actually wanted your mother to be killed? Yes. That he counseled your brother to kill her? Yeah. No way to prove that.

But when the time came, she said it out loud in court. She read a family statement that left no doubt what she believed. He was the one who pressured his son, the killer. We don't understand how this killer was able to carry out this dreadful scheme that was planned out by his father. Others close to Nada suspect Basil may have influenced his son. A 16-year-old is still a child, and a child who is molded by adults.

And so who did the molding here? Basel Al-Tintawi has never been charged. During the divorce, he denied trying to turn Muhammad against his mother. But evidence introduced at the trial does raise questions about what he might have known and when. Right after getting that text from his mom about the deposition, Muhammad sent it to his dad.

and it was to his dad he sent that photo of the open window. Then, on the morning of the murder, before Nada's body was discovered, records show, Muhammad and his dad called or messaged each other more than 20 times. We sent multiple requests to Basil, asking him for any comment he may wish to make. There has been no response.

The prosecutor declined our request for an interview, but told us he didn't find enough evidence connecting Basil to the crime to charge him. In this case, I find it extremely difficult to have to sentence this young man in what can only be described as a very heinous offense. Muhammad was sentenced to 35 to 60 years in prison. Aya hasn't spoken to him since. She's lost touch with her sister, too.

because her sister lives with her dad. If I were to ever reach out to him, it would just be because of my sister. He's dead to me for all I care. I don't need my dad. I've made a pretty great life for myself, if I do say so myself. So what are you going to do with it, this life of yours? I'm going to become a lawyer. She is determined, this young woman, to leave the past behind. She graduated college in three years, and after law school,

She hopes one day to help foster kids and vulnerable children like she once was. I want to make an impact on the world. Just like her mother did. With her big smile and big heart, Aya wants to make her proud.

That's all for this edition of Dateline. And check out our Talking Dateline podcast. Keith Morrison and Andrea Canning will go behind the scenes of tonight's episode, available Wednesday in the Dateline feed wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you again next Friday for our two-hour season premiere at 9, 8 Central. I'm Lester Holt. For all of us at NBC News, good night.

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