MINNEAPOLIS -- A Coon Rapids, Minn., man went to suburban Detroit and fatally shot his 20-year-old stepdaughter in the head because she left Minnesota to live with her father and was not adhering to Muslim customs, police said Tuesday.
Rahim A. Alfetlawi, 45, was charged Monday in Warren, Mich., with first-degree premeditated murder and two weapons offenses. Alfetlawi remains jailed without bond.
Alfetlawi is accused of killing Jessica Mokdad with a single gunshot to the head Saturday afternoon as she was in her grandmother's home.
Mokdad attended Coon Rapids High School and was on the dean's list in the fall of 2009.
"The biological father was letting her be a little more Americanized than what (the defendant) wanted," said Warren Police Lt. Michael Torey.
Alfetlawi also was upset that Mokdad left the home of Alfetlawi and Mokdad's mother, Wendy, several weeks ago to live with her father in Grand Blanc, Mich., Torey said.
Alfetlawi confronted his stepdaughter at her grandmother's home in Warren, where she was moving some things for her great-grandmother. He shot her with a 9mm handgun, Torey said. She died at the scene.
He got in a car, drove to a police station in neighboring Center Line and "made some admissions about killing his stepdaughter," the lieutenant said.
A friend told WJBK-TV in Detroit that Jessica Mokdad came to Michigan to escape her stepfather. "She just wants to express herself the way she wants and not what he wants," said friend Kayla Chuba.
(c) 2011, Star Tribune (Minneapolis).
Visit the Star Tribune, www.startribune.com
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
Comments