Amina and Sarah Said

Case background and investigation

Amina Said, 18, and her sister Sarah Said, 17, were found shot to death in a taxi parked outside a hotel in Irving, Texas, on New Year's Day 2008. CBS News Texas reported that both were students at Lewisville High School. According to NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth, Amina had been shot twice and Sarah nine times, and Sarah made a 911 call in which she said her father had shot her and that she was dying.

The taxi was one driven by their father, Yaser Said, an Egyptian-born cab driver who, according to CBS News Texas, had immigrated to the United States in 1983 and become a citizen. ABC News reported that in the days before the shooting Amina had written to a teacher that she feared her father would kill them, that the sisters and their mother had left for Oklahoma on December 25, 2007, and that they had returned to the Dallas area on December 31.

Said was not found after the shooting. According to Wikipedia's account, the FBI added him to its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list on December 4, 2014; NBC 5 reported that he spent six years on the list. He was arrested on August 26, 2020, in Justin, Texas, more than 12 years after the killings.

Two relatives were prosecuted in federal court for helping him hide. NBC 5 reported that his son, Islam Said, pleaded guilty and was sentenced on April 27, 2021, to 10 years in federal prison, and that his brother, Yassein Said, was convicted by a jury in February 2021 and sentenced on June 4, 2021, to 12 years. Both cases involved charges of conspiracy to conceal a person from arrest, concealing a person from arrest, and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding.

Yaser Said's capital murder trial took place in Dallas County in August 2022. Prosecutors argued that he was preoccupied with controlling his daughters and killed them because they were dating and seeking independence, and they described the deaths as so-called honor killings. Said testified and denied killing his daughters, saying he had left the taxi and gone into nearby woods because he believed someone was following them. His lawyers argued that the investigation had been weak and had focused on him because he is Muslim.

On August 9, 2022, after about three hours of deliberation, the jury found him guilty of capital murder. Because prosecutors had not sought the death penalty, Judge Chika Anyiam imposed the automatic sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. A Texas court of appeals opinion in Yaser Abdel Said v. State, dated December 21, 2023, is listed on CourtListener; search results describe it as affirming the conviction.