tina then screams, pleading with her mother to help. tina, pleading, mother, please help me. mother, can t you make him stop ? and then he said, die my daughter, die, when she was dying. maria held tina while zein stabbed her to death. and the telltale sign was the mother s response. what help? no. shut up. nowhere on the tape did tina demand $5,000. and there was no reference to tina having a knife. the tape also reveals the isas waited for close to 30 minutes to call police after the murder. zein and maria isa were both charged with first-degree murder.
tina s parents insisted her death was in self-defense because she had attacked them with a knife. tina s father was covered in blood. and had cuts on his hands which he said were defensive wounds that resulted from his daughter s knife attack. when i reviewed a little bit of history i knew at the time, it sounded extremely suspicious to me. medical examiners have long referred to the autopsy as the silent witness. a way for the victim to tell her story. things that the suspects in a crime usually leave out. at tina s autopsy, forensic pathologist dr. philip burch started his examination with a forensic technique known as wound pattern analysis. i didn t look just at one wound in this case, i looked at all of the wounds as a whole. tina sustained six deep stab wounds to the solar plexus, all in close proximity.
dream of. she was a high school athlete, popular, a straight a student and wanted to attend college and become an airline pilot. tina wanted to be american. tina wanted to be independent. she wanted to have a career. she wanted to travel. she wanted to be her own person. her mother and father, zein and maria isa, were immigrants from palestine and ran a grocery store in downtown st. louis. like most immigrants, the palestinians went into the food business. that s a tradition in america. food service is one of the easiest types of businesses to operate. what was especially appealing to the isas and their relatives it was another way to rip off america. they could avoid paying taxes. they would play little games with food stamp fraud, grocery coupons. i mean, zein even said he loved america because there were so
self-defense as her parents claimed. dr. victor levine is an expert on the middle east and says tina s death sounded tragically familiar. zein isa comes from a small town in palestine and he carried with him that whole baggage. every day there are dozens and even hundreds of women who are in some fashion killed for the commission of some crime involving the sexual honor of the family. though dating is common in the united states, it s discouraged in parts of the middle east where arranged marriages are the norm. when a man and his family have daughters, daughters are the purity of these women, of the daughters, then guarantees a marriage. you see, and the delivery of the girl intact, virginally intact,