Murder in the Foothills

Published Time: 2012-11-08T22:01:00+00:00

By Scott Thomas Anderson and Raheem Hosseini

It was when he saw the girls’ eyes that Hafed Mohamed Thabet realized what he had become.

In the summer of 1993, a then-23-year-old Thabet strutted into a nondescript courtroom 40 miles east of Sacramento to iron out what had spiraled into a gross cultural misunderstanding. Bound by tribal law and propelled by circumstance, Thabet had killed the man who murdered his father and two others in a remote Yemen village two decades earlier.

Surely such retributive justice was permitted in a Christian nation like the United States, Thabet believed—a thought he maintained while stalking his prey cross-country to the foothills of Northern California, as he dispassionately recounted his deed to detectives, and right up until he stepped into that Jackson courthouse like someone with a speeding ticket and a legitimate excuse.

But then Thabet saw the eyes of his victim’s three daughters—sponged with a hurt he knew all too well. It was only then that Thabet realized he wasn’t the hero of his own tale.

“I saw these three little girls looking at me as I was a monster, just like I looked at their father,” he recalls. “I saw what I hated most.”

Hafed Thabet at his fourth parole hearing in 2012.

Days earlier, Thabet gunned down his father’s killer in broad daylight at a gas station in rural Amador County. The scene was a funhouse mirror version of the one that unraveled 19 years prior and 8,000 miles east, where the man named Ahmed Ali Alharsami sprayed bullets into Thabet’s family home over a marriage dispute.

Thabet set out to do what the courts back home permitted, what his culture ordered and what the legal system here apparently refused to do. He avenged his father’s murder and reclaimed honor for his ruined family. Thabet thought he got justice.

Instead, the Yemeni national sealed another bloody link in the chain of honor killings that creates martyrs out of victims and turns survivors into vigilantes.

All these years later—as his nation labors through fierce protests and a precarious revolution—the now 42-year-old Thabet sits before two parole commissioners, trying to articulate the cruel ironies that turned a grieving son into a convicted murderer.

This early September afternoon marks Thabet’s fourth appearance before the California Board of Parole Hearings. For the model prisoner, this room is where the state’s correctional system has proven how arbitrary its proxy court can be. It’s where American justice has blocked a Middle Eastern daughter’s attempts to export forgiveness and peace to a region that desperately needs both. More than that, though, this cramped room inside Mule Creek State Prison is a stage for one actor telling a tale he’s told countless times before.

Thabet has known for a while now that he is not the hero of this incredible tale. But he isn’t its only victim, either.

Slaughter in Yemen

Thabet grew up in Aldakalah, a small village in the Ibb province of western Yemen. Its valley of wells and cisterns is tucked under terraced hillsides that fade from lush teal in the fall to sun-scorched, jagged blisters in the warmer months. Thabet’s family was among the most prominent in the community by virtue of his father, Mohamed, being the village sheik.

In this far-flung settlement of narrow buildings and ancient-faced stone huts—nestled in a divided nation with a feeble, grafting government—Mohamed was mediator and judge to a handful of tribes that looked to him for wisdom. He was Solomon in an isolated valley town that was ever on its own. Respected as he was, though, there was one dispute he wouldn’t be able to calm.

A quiet existence unraveled when Thabet’s older sister, Mahlia, married Ahmed Alharsami, a hot-tempered young man who frequently made sojourns to the United States. As the union progressed, Mahlia revealed to her father that Alharsami was physically abusing her, beating her any time he flew into one of his signature fits of rage. By the time Hafed was four, his older sister had grown worried about Alharsami’s plans to take her with him to the U.S. Mahlia’s father agreed.

“No,” Mohamed told the family about the proposed move, “if he beats her in Yemen, then what will he do to her when she’s farther away from her dad?”

Mahlia moved back home. Her husband seethed. The episode tapped a venomous well inside a man who couldn’t abide refusal.

The village of Dakhla in Yemen, where the Alharsami family lived.

On Feb. 13, 1974, Alharsami confronted his father-in-law to demand Mahlia’s return. Again he was denied. Alharsami stalked away, but not before leveling an ominous threat at the sheik standing in his path.

The next afternoon, Mohamed sat inside the unfinished home he and a relative were building into the side of a hill. After a long morning toiling on the farm, the sheik sipped tea at a table in the far corner with his cousin and a 60-year-old friend. A few feet away, a 4-year-old Hafed lay on his stomach, playing with a homemade car he assembled from a tin can and shower shoes. Without a word, Alharsami appeared in the open doorway with his hands wrapped around the belly of an AK-47.

The next few seconds were a blur of shouting and the tin-driven drone of 33 smoking bullet shells raining on the floor. In the onslaught, a boy felt his father topple onto him, shielding him from the storm. It was the sheik’s final gift to his son.

Ahmed Alharsami after escaping to the United States.

Down the street, Hafed’s mother, Mooriah, was on a rooftop hanging laundry on a clothesline. When an approaching villager shouted out the senseless news, she fainted, plummeting three stories onto the dusty street below.

Despite absorbing more than 20 rounds to his chest and stomach, Hafed’s father didn’t die immediately. That happened eight agonizing hours later, as four men carried him along an unpaved road to a hospital hundreds of miles away. The other two victims, also fathers, perished as well. Hafed’s mother was confined to intensive care with severe back and shoulder injuries. Hafed and his siblings were rushed to a grandparent’s home as gunfights broke out across the village.

Machine guns clamored for their fallen king.

Matters of Honor

In the tube-fluorescent confines of a motel bathroom in Jackson, a 23-year-old Hafed Thabet stared at himself in a wide, anonymous mirror. As manhood settled his features, Thabet was able to see more of the father whose gentle presence he scarcely recalled. But now that Thabet had cut his hair and shaved his mustache, the dead sheik no longer stared back.

After traveling 2,800 westward miles across the cracked plains of America, Thabet altered his appearance for one reason—so that the man he had come for would not realize, until it was too late, that his reckoning had arrived.

It was a long journey to that mirror: In 1974, a Yemeni court convicted Alharsami of triple homicide and sentenced him to death. The ruling, however, was made after the defendant escaped into the vast unknown of the United States. Meanwhile, Thabet’s mother was in and out of hospitals with debilitating back injuries from her fall off the rooftop. With little money coming in, what remained of the Thabet clan dribbled to the bottom of the village’s social and economic castes.

Haunted by residual echoes of gunfire and plagued by culturally driven ridicule, life without a father was particularly hard for Thabet. In a region where gunfire erupted in celebration as often as it did in anger, a jumpy Thabet found himself teased, bullied and left behind during festivals, weddings and other social gatherings.

So when an opportunity to leave home came, Thabet snatched it. In 1991, Thabet temporarily moved to America to earn money for his family back home. He first lived with an aunt and uncle in Watsonville, California, where he stocked store shelves. Unbeknownst to him, Thabet’s aunt harbored secret concerns that Alharsami, who lived just hours away, would discover that the child he failed to kill 18 years earlier was now in California. Thabet was never told Alharsami was near. Instead his aunt encouraged him to stay with his brother in New York.

Alharsami with two of his daughters.

It was while he was with his brother in New York stocking shelves that members of the insular Yemeni community alerted Thabet his father’s killer was a coast away, enjoying the spoils of a free man. Since at least 1982, relatives of the fallen sheik had petitioned the U.S. to extradite Alharsami back to Yemen, where he would have been put to death. But the government here never responded, leaving the sheik’s family one other option: In Yemen, the law afforded sons the right to mete out the capital punishments its courts could not. Thabet’s culture absolutely demanded it.

Back in Aldakalah, Thabet had witnessed firsthand what became of those who didn’t regain their families’ honor. One local man who elected not to avenge his father’s accidental killing was roundly ostracized and barred from taking a wife. If word reached home that Thabet failed to avenge his father’s murder, an already tortured existence would become unbearable.

Pressure mounted on Thabet to perform his sacred duty. The sheik’s cousins, especially, made their expectations known to the angry young man.

“It’s like the only thing they had was me,” Thabet says through the static whisper of a prison payphone. “I already hated the man for what he did to my father, and they nurtured that. I didn’t need a lot of encouragement, but I got a lot of it from them.”

As Thabet wavered, those around him continued with their machinations. In the coming weeks, he was provided a white, windowless Chevy van singed with orange and yellow stripes, a route to California and a recent photograph of his father’s murderer. A young Yemeni acquaintance named Tamin Hauter, who spent time with the Alharsami family some years earlier, was assigned as his driver.

Thabet met with an immigration attorney to extend his visa and see if there was any way to put off his grim decision. The answer came that he would be back in Yemen within months.

With time officially running out, Thabet bought a 9mm pistol and 38.-caliber revolver from an elderly man in his brother’s apartment complex.

The Hunt

On the opposite coast, unaware of the forces conspiring against him, Alharsami was busy making new enemies. Whipped into an impulsive fury, the now-41-year-old Alharsami strode past the helpless eyes of a young clerk and down the narrow aisles of the general store he used to own, knocking down its goods and spitting on the floor he once mopped.

Alharsami had recently parted with this store in the remote hamlet of West Point in Calaveras County. Overcome by an acute case of seller’s remorse, Alharsami tried to buy back the business he sold to a local Yemeni family. When Rafik Sanad and his uncle rebuffed the offer, an unhinged Alharsami decided to make his counter offer in person.

The Sanads soon learned a lesson that Thabet’s father had discovered at the business end of an automatic rifle 20 years earlier: You don’t just say no to Ahmed Alharsami.

According to investigative documents, Rafik Sanad decided to administer his own lesson soon after.

One month before his death, Alharsami’s neighbors and his fourth wife, Salwa, observed a dark sedan pull up to his West Point home. An unidentified Hispanic male employed by the store exited the vehicle and met Alharsami at his door, telling him he could either leave town or end up dead.

According to Salwa, Rafik Sanad remained in the car, laughing.

Though he downplayed the incident to a concerned neighbor, an already paranoid and frequently armed Alharsami briefly took to wearing a bulletproof vest wherever he went.

In the aftermath of Alharsami’s death, Sanad would begrudgingly acknowledge to a sheriff’s detective a certain degree of “bad blood” between him and the victim. But the tight-lipped Sanad gave up little more and his threatening employee was never found. Back in New York, Thabet’s visa was now weeks from expiration. He and the 19-year-old Hauter shoved off on a grueling cross-country odyssey whose invisible tracks had already been laid.

By Saturday, May 15, 1993, Thabet and Hauter were stopping over in Reno, Nev. Two nights later they arrived at the bland, brick-cobbled motel in Jackson, California, and began making reconnaissance trips to West Point.

They were aided by a young Hispanic male they’d met in an empty schoolyard, whom Hauter would later identify only as “Miguel.” It’s uncertain whether he’s the same man who threatened Alharsami at his door. Miguel guided the amateur hunters directly to Alharsami’s home, pointing out an arterial road that sneaked directly up on its back.

Over the next 48 hours, they stalked their prey from a distance, often sitting for hours in the reeking van that was now overladen with empty cigarette packs and fast food wrappers. During a rendezvous at a grease-gutted diner at the bottom of the mountain, Miguel warned Thabet and Hauter that they were drawing unwanted attention in West Point, a tiny speck of a burg where residents take notice of loitering outsiders. He assured the pair that Alharsami made regular trips to the nearby town of Pine Grove, and directed them to a tidy commercial square where they could prepare their ambush.