Widow testifies in dad’s ‘honor killings’ trial
Emotional daughter describes wrathful, controlling father
A young widow at the center of two alleged “honor killings” testifies that her father was a deeply religious Muslim who repeatedly threatened her life and the lives of others if she even dated.
A young Houston widow whose father is charged in two alleged “honor killings,” including the shooting death of her husband, broke down in tears and briefly left the witness stand as she described coming home in 2012 to find her husband dead in their apartment.
“I saw him on the floor; I tried to wake him up,” Nesreen Irsan testified. “He wasn’t moving, and he was cold. I just started screaming.”
The 30-yearold took the witness stand Monday and testified against her father, Ali Mahwood-Awad Irsan, who faces the death penalty if convicted of the capital murder of Nesreen’s husband and a close friend. Prosecutors allege the elder Irsan orchestrated the deaths in an “honor killings” plot, motivated by his disapproval of Nesreen’s conversion to Christianity and marriage to a local man, who was a Christian.
Dressed in a white sleeveless blouse, a white sweater and a denim skirt—in marked contrast from the traditional Muslim head scarf and long sleeves she had been forced to wear while growing up — she told the jury about existence in a family compound in Montgomery County.
Nasreen Irsan portrayed her father as more than a strict disciplinarian. She said he was a controlling and manipulative patriarch who terrified her and the rest of her extended family that included a dozen children.
Irsan also had two wives who both lived in the hodgepodge of trailers and small buildings on the three-acre plot. Irsan married a 14-year-old Jordanian girl in the early 1990s and arranged her immigration to America. After the younger wife moved in, Nesreen’s mother moved back to her home state of Minnesota.
During her wide-ranging testimony Monday, Nesreen Irsan also detailed a harrowing crash on the Eastex Freeway that erupted because she and her sister came to blows over what they could tell her father about their social life without putting themselves in jeopardy of his wrath. After her sister threatened to call her father and expose her secret relationship with a Christian man, the two women began grappling over a cellphone as they drove down the freeway.
Prosecutors told the jury that Irsan, a 60-year-old Jordanian immigrant and fervent Muslim, orchestrated the killing of his son-in-law, Coty Beavers, 28,
whom she found dead in the couple’s apartment when she returned from work in November 2012. Her husband was killed 11 months after the fatal shooting of her close friend, Gelareh Bagherzadeh, a 30-year-old Iranian activist and medical student. “I felt like she was my sister, my real sister, and cared about me,” Nesreen Irsan said about the activist who also converted to Christianity. After Bagherzadeh was killed, Irsan allegedly called Nesreen and said, “The bitch was first and you’re going to be next.”
She began her testimony by describing her father as a deeply religious Muslim who repeatedly threatened her life and the lives of others if she even dated men.
“He said, ‘If you have boyfriends, I’m going to kill you,’ ” she said on the stand. “‘I’m going to put a bullet between your eyes and his eyes.’ ”
On Monday, Nesreen testified that while growing up in his strict household in a rural Montgomery County compound, she was forced to wear a hijab and long sleeves. She was barred from being alone with any men outside of her family.
Met twins at college
When she was 21, her older sister, Nadia, persuaded their father to let them go to Lone Star College to pursue medical degrees, Nesreen said.
At the community college, the two sisters started wearing makeup and talking to men. Within months, they met twins Coty and Cory Beavers.
Nesreen said she and Coty began dating. After almost a year, Nadia became jealous and began threatening to tell their father.
In April 2011, the dispute boiled over while the two sisters were driving home from the Medical Center, and, Nesreen said, they began to physically fight.
Nadia allegedly threatened to call their father and tell him about Beavers, and Nesreen called her bluff and started calling their father to tell him that neither sister was observing his rules.
Nesreen also said she was no longer Muslim.
“I said, ‘I’m not breaking up with him. I’m not even Muslim anymore! I just fake pray and pretend,’ ” Nesreen testified. She said she took off her head scarf and threw it in the backseat. She started to call their father to tell him everything.
It was then, Nesreen said, that the two women were hitting each other. She said Nadia climbed on her while she was speeding down the highway as the two battled for the cellphone.
The dark gray Mitsubishi sedan swerved across the highway, hit a guardrail and came to rest facing the wrong way on the highway.
Nesreen was taken to a hospital, where she was diagnosed with a concussion, but her father would not let her stay overnight for observation. He also refused to let medical personnel insert a catheter because, she said, he was worried it would “break my virginity.”
Breaking away
Nesreen eventually ran away from home and married Beavers on July 5, 2012. He was killed in November, three days after her 25th birthday.
As she talked about coming home to find Beavers at the northwest Harris County apartment, she started to cry and asked for a break. In an unusual move, she was escorted out of the courtroom in tears while jurors waited about five minutes.
She returned to continue testifying and spent the entire day on the stand, first being questioned by special prosecutor Anna Emmons and then crossexamined by defense attorney Allen Tanner.
Prosecutors have worked to build a case to prove that the two slayings were connected by the same scheme. Under Texas law, Irsan can be convicted of capital murder if the shootings were part of the same plan.
Defense attorneys for Irsan have said the evidence surrounding both shootings was circumstantial and that no one knows exactly what happened in either case.
The trial, in its third week of testimony, is in state District Jan Krocker’s court.
“He said, ‘If you have boyfriends, I’m going to kill you. I’m going to put a bullet between your eyes and his eyes.’ ” Nesreen Irsan, testifying about her father