Inside the domestic violence investigation that collapsed, years before victim's murder
CBC
The video shows an intimate partner violence detective entering the interview room at Ottawa police headquarters on Elgin Street.
Hanadi Mohammed — then 42, eight years before her murder — follows in a long black dress, glasses and beige hijab. She looks at the camera and around the room before taking a seat.
It's Oct. 1, 2013, the day after Mohammed told police she was frightened of her husband Hamid Ayoub, and that he had recently held a knife during a confrontation with her.
In Arabic, through a translator, Mohammed speaks to Det. Erin McMullan. (McMullan, now an acting sergeant, was using the surname Lehman in 2013.)
Mohammed tells the officer about life under Ayoub's rule — how he controls and dominates her, their son and daughter; how arguments with him make her feel like she has to shut up because he's a powerful man; how she's expected to serve him.
She talks of other women Ayoub knows, and about a confrontation she and Ayoub had in their kitchen the morning of Aug. 11, 2013, the day after Mohammed refused to speak with one of the women.
Ayoub asked what was going on, what the problem was, Mohammed recalls. Then he put his arm around Mohammed's neck from behind her, and as he kept her there she saw him grab a knife from a knife block in front of her.
Mohammed screamed to her sleeping children for help — they'd had to call police to help her before, she tells the detective. Ayoub, still holding the knife in his fist with his other arm around Mohammed's neck, asked Mohammed why she called police on him in the past.
The kids came downstairs. The phone wasn't working that day. The daughter asked Ayoub to let her mother go and leave her alone, Mohammed recalls.
Then Ayoub released Mohammed. He apologized, giving his oft-repeated excuse that he probably behaved that way because of his stomach and back pain. He hugged the children, got breakfast ready, and ate with the kids.
Mohammed couldn't eat. She was crying.
"You were trying to kill me. You don't love me," she recalls telling him.
Ayoub replied, "If I don't love you, I would have left a long time ago."
Mohammed tells McMullan that two weeks later the family traveled to Sudan, their native country, for a month. There were tensions between her and Ayoub and their respective families as she sometimes resisted his control.
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