A Texas man whom police had sought for 12 years was convicted Tuesday of killing his teenage daughters and sentenced to life in prison without parole, prosecutors said.
Yaser Said, 65, spent almost six of the 12 years following the Jan. 1, 2008, murders on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list before he was found in an apartment in the Fort Worth suburb of Justin.
A jury convicted him of capital murder Tuesday in the slayings of daughters Sarah Said, 17, and Amina Said, 18, the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office said.
Said not only abused the family and killed his own daughters, but he also “brainwashed” his adult son, who is serving 10 years in prison for helping harbor him, the girls’ mother, Patricia Owens, said in court Tuesday.
“That mean look that you are glaring at me with — I’m not scared of you anymore,” Owens said, according to video from NBC Dallas-Fort Worth.
The girls were found dead in their father's taxi outside a hotel in Irving, a city in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, officials said.
“Help! My dad shot me!” Sarah Said told a 911 dispatcher that night, the district attorney’s office said.
Yaser Said was “obsessed with possession and control” and would not let his daughters date or go to the movies, prosecutor Lauren Black told jurors, NBC Dallas-Fort Worth reported.
Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot said in a statement Tuesday, “While this verdict does not bring Sarah and Amina back, my office and this jury have done all that is in our power to see that justice is done.”
Said, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in Egypt, denied killing his daughters. He said he was upset that the girls had left home a week earlier, going to Oklahoma with their mother and their boyfriends, but that he did not murder them.
“I was upset because in my culture it’s something to get upset about,” he said.
He said he thought that he was being followed by someone targeting him and that he left the girls, who knew how to drive, with the car.
Said was arrested in August 2020 at a home in Justin.
Said’s son and brother were charged federally with helping him evade capture after the killings.
His son, Islam Said, was sentenced last year to 10 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to three federal counts, including concealing a person from arrest and obstruction of an official proceeding, the Justice Department has said.
The brother, Yassein Said, was sentenced last year to 12 years in prison after he was found guilty of the same charges.
They had Yaser Said at an apartment in Bedford, also in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, until a maintenance worker recognized him in 2017, and they were involved in harboring him at the home in Justin, federal prosecutors have said.