SISTER’S GRIEF
Writes of heartache after slay of brother
Even now, a month after the murder and dismemberment of millionaire tech wizard Fahim Saleh, the truth remains hard — and heartbreaking — for his sister to accept.
“Sometimes it still doesn’t feel real that Fahim is gone,” wrote Ruby Angela Saleh in a lengthy essay for Medium.com on the one-month anniversary of her brother’s Lower East Side killing. “And sometimes it feels too precisely like the cruel, heinous and unbearable reality that it is, letting me see nothing but the darkness and feel nothing but the piercing pain in every quadrant of my heart.”
The moving piece posted online Thursday recounted the two late-night calls where she learned the devastating details from her aunt and her sister: Her beloved baby brother, eight years younger and perpetually precocious, was gone. Ruby recalls dropping the phone and crawling across the cold wooden floor of her home.
“I shook my head. ‘No, no,’ I said, my hair falling over my face,” she recalled. “I looked up at my husband. He was already crying, as if he had accepted these words about my brother as truth. His crying didn’t make sense to me, because this news couldn’t be real.”
The body of Saleh, 33, was found in the living room of his $2 million apartment on E. Houston St. on July 13. His head, arms and legs had been cut off by a power saw left behind in the condo.
Cops said the dead man’s former personal assistant, dressed in a suit and tie and wearing a ninja mask, disabled his old boss with a Taser and stabbed him multiple times before carving up the body.
Another sister of the victim made the grisly discovery, interrupting the killer, who was still in the process of carving up the body, according to cops. The killer dashed out a back exit when he heard her arriving.
Ruby Angela Saleh’s essay moves between fond memories and harsh realities, of Ruby holding her newborn brother wrapped in an orange fleece blanket and three decades later identifying her sibling’s remains from a photo emailed by a funeral home.
“My sister, cousin and I held hands and said prayer before opening the attachment,” she wrote. “And there it was: A photo of my beautiful brother, lifeless. My sister howled. ‘No, no, no, it’s real now, it’s real now,’ she kept repeating. I held her tight. We wanted to ask that photo, our beloved brother, ‘How did this happen to you, baby?’ ”
Saleh, co-founder of the Nigerian motorcycle ride-sharing service Gokada, was a precocious businessman who launched his first tech company as a teen.
On the morning of his funeral, Ruby recalled listening to the sounds of her parents sobbing at 3 a.m. On a hot July day, the Saleh clan gathered as his remains were lowered into the earth.
“My family and I looked at our sweet boy’s face in the casket,” she wrote. “He seemed to be sleeping peacefully. His body was covered in a white sheet … his beautiful eyelashes long and lustrous against his skin … Our mother kept repeating, ‘OK, you sleep now, baby boy. You get some rest. You sleep now.’ ”
Time appears unlikely to heal the wounds inflicted by her brother’s personal assistant any time soon. Accused killer Tyrese Haspil, 21, embezzled $90,000 from Saleh before the savage slaying.
“Thanksgiving, our family’s favorite holiday, will be especially difficult this year,” wrote Ruby. “Fahim always made the garlic mashed potatoes, while I made the stuffing and my sister made her famous mac and cheese.”