Siblings of man in ‘honor killings’ testify

Brothers and sisters speak for immigrant facing death penalty

Defense attorneys for a Jordanian immigrant facing the death penalty for killing his son-inlaw and his daughter’s close friend in two 2012 “honor killings” spent Thursday trying to elicit support and sympathy for their client, calling family members to testify about beatings he endured during a strict upbringing in the Middle East.

Testifying from Jordan using a Skype video chat application and an Arabic interpreter, brothers and sisters of Ali Mahwood-Awad Irsan told of the rigors of growing up with an abusive father in a country torn by war.

Earlier in the seven-week capital murder trial, the 60year-old Irsan was quickly found guilty of orchestrating the two homicides as part of broader plot to kill five people, including his daughter, after she ran away from the family compound in rural Montgomery County, converted to Christianity and married a Christian man. His daughter survived and testified against her father.

On Thursday, Irsan’s older sister testified that he was frequently beaten and kicked out of the house by their father who was often angry.

“He would get mad,” Nawal Rawabdeh Irsan said about their father in Jordan, through a court interpreter. “He used to beat him with his hand, with a cord, with a stick.”

The sister talked about a 1970 war involving the Palestine Liberation Organization that resulted in a path of dead bodies the children had to traverse to get water from a well or to get food.

“We went up to the bakery,” she said. “At the bakery, there were dead people.”

Irsan’s brother, Omar Rawabdeh, also said their father, who was in the Jordanian army, often physically abused Irsan and the other children.

“He would beat us,” Rawabdeh said.

Irsan was convicted last month for the double homicide of 28-year-old Coty Beavers in November 2012 and Gelareh Bagherzadeh, a 30-year-old Iranian activist who was a close friend of Irsan’s daughter, 11 months earlier.

Irsan, a father of 12, was enraged that his adult daughter ran away from the family’s rural Montgomery County compound to convert and marry a Christian. Testimony showed that he stalked his daughter and her husband for months before slipping into the couple’s apartment and shooting Beavers, who was hit by five bullet rounds.

Bagherzadeh was shot once in the head while on the phone in her car outside of her parent’s Galleria-area town house in January 2012.

After jurors convicted Irsan last month, the trial moved to a punishment phase in which prosecutors worked to show that Irsan would be a continuing danger to the community and should be sentenced to death.

The defense has mounted an effort to sway the jury to sentence Irsan to life in prison without parole.

The trial, in state District Judge Jan Krocker’s court, is expected to last another week.