The Shadow in the Window

0:01I 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's out? Like two stories, yeah. I got a phone call. Nada's dead. And I was like, what? I was crying for weeks. 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. I said, God, this cannot be. 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, Bob.

0:45She was awake before me. That's what I understand. Somebody killed her, left no evidence, and got away with something. We were all horrified, absolutely horrified. I started yelling and screaming. You were absolutely nothing to do! No remorse, no empathy for anyone else. None of it felt real.

1:16The 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, 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 Altantawi. 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.

2:21What'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 of 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.

3:09I 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.

3:46But 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.

4:31And 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's like in those movies or when you read in the books where it's like the character's like, oh, I screamed, but I didn't realize it was coming from me. 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 like started running downstairs.

5:15He was following me and I called 911.

5:37Aya handed the phone to her brother so the dispatcher could talk him through CPR.

5:48Six. 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 open, but they were cleaning supplies, and I know she was cleaning something in the morning. She makes it early. Sure enough, police photos show a stepladder in the guest bedroom and streaks of cleaning fluid on the window pane. 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?

6:23Or 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. Mohamed 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 I was also getting calls from people in the community already. Like, is everything okay? Do you need anything? It's chaos.

6:59With 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. And Aya'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.

7:30My dad was on the phone with his mom, and he was talking in Arabic. He was whispering, and he said, um, Nat is dead. I was like, what? What do you mean Nat is dead? I mean, I was crying for weeks and weeks after this happened because she was such a sweetheart. Loved ones react to devastating news while an autopsy raises questions. This type of injury to the scalp, I would expect to bleed pretty heavily, but there was no blood there.

8:21An 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 or what happens to you. Becoming a motherless child is a difficult passage. Yeah. Aya felt so alone. Her mom's family's 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.

9:11Basil 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 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.

9:54What 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 going to go to my room. And she's like, no, 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 asks 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. Yeah. But what did happen? As Farmington Hills Police investigators began pondering that, But they got phone calls from Nada's friends, friends who clearly adored her.

10:39She would walk into class happy with a smile on her face. Dini and Susie, who asked that we not use their last names for privacy reasons, knew Nada from their gym, the Franklin Athletic Club. They'd 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.

11:24Lubisha 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. There was a deep kind of scrape right above her mid-forehead. And it struck me that this type of injury to the scalp, I would expect to bleed pretty heavily.

12:14But there was no blood there. 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.

13:10But they did see something, something very strange, and it changed everything. I said, God, this cannot be.

13:36They could only hope, of course, the 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.

14:16A grisly shadow play of what looked like a person moving at the window, lifting something. What was your sort of reaction in the moment? 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 dead 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.

15:05Basil 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, I had told us, starting with a job. She's like, I'm going to be a personal trainer. This is what I want to do.

15:47He absolutely lost it. Why would I 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 was 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. Yeah, really painful.

16:27Aya 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.

17:20That'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 off 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.

18:08Lost 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, and 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?

18:40Hurt 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.

18:59That is San tells police about the moment he saw his mother's body. I looked down, I didn't want to do it. I was like a dream and saw it into my room immediately and I just wanted to forget about it. And then brings up the other person in the house. I don't want to say anything about my sister, Paul. I mean, if it comes down to it, then yeah, she was away before me. That's what I said.

19:44There'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 was 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.

20:31There was no way he could have been the shadow in the window. Which meant, what? Sir, what are you going to do, sir? Not like it. 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 don't know, would there be like a door chime or anything like that? Yeah, the thing is, on Sunday, I had pretty bad ear infections, so I couldn't really hear from one ear.

21:09Mohamed said the first time he knew something was wrong was when he heard his sister yelling at his bedroom door. So then we went across all the way around the house and I didn't really know what to do from there. So I went back inside, brought some water for her, went back outside and that's when the operators turned me to the CPR. Detectives told Muhammad 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. We know that. It's on video.

21:48So we know that somebody was there when it happened. I don't want to say anything about my sister, Paul. I mean, if it comes down to it, then yeah, she was away 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. You're telling me right now that you weren't in the room like maybe helping her clean the windows or holding the ladder or anything like that, when this happened, when this accident happened. Muhammad told his story again, but the detectives didn't seem satisfied. I mean, now's the time, if we're going to be honest about it, we've got to be honest about it now.

22:27And 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. I just, that's it. I left. There's got to be more. I can tell, by the way, you're going to feel a lot better so we can get this explained out as an accident. Is that what happened? It's my mom's life, man. Just tell us. You've gone this far, bud.

23:02Finally, 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, and I didn't want to... I didn't want to do... I was like a dream, and so I went to my room immediately, and I just wanted to forget about it. I just saw my mom fall, man. 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.

23:44I need to not tell you now. I don't want to go any further. You know, you're investigating a child here. 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? Mm-mm. I thought it was just routine. They had questions. They needed an answer down on the station kind of thing. But there was nothing routine about this. Ayah 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.

24:21Blamed 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. Like, they're charging your brother. Muhammad had been arrested for the murder of their mother.

24:57I was like, oh, okay. Wait a minute, you didn't just go, oh, okay. Yeah, 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.

25:38It 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.

26:11Muhammad Altantawi, 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. Mohamed's dad hired veteran attorney Michael Sciano to defend his son. I don't believe Mohamed 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 this 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.