Texas trial begins for man accused of killing his daughters

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DALLAS -- A man who evaded arrest for more than 12 years after being accused of fatally shooting his two teenage daughters in a taxi parked near a Dallas-area hotel was “obsessed with possession and control,” a prosecutor said Tuesday during opening statements of his capital murder trial. <br>About a week before the sisters were killed, they and their mother fled their home in the Dallas suburb of Lewisville to Oklahoma to get away from Yaser Said, who worked as a taxi driver, Black said. The sisters had become “very scared for their lives,” and the decision to leave was made after Said “put a gun to Amina's head and threatened to kill her,” the prosecutor said.<br>In a letter written to the judge overseeing the case, Said said he was not happy with his kids’ “dating activity” but denied killing his daughters. Defense attorney Joseph Patton said in opening statements that the evidence would not support a conviction, that police were too quick to focus on Said and suggested that anti-Muslim sentiment played into that focus. Said was born in Egypt.<br>In an email to her Lewisville High School history teacher 11 days before she and her sister were killed, Amina Said said that she and Sarah did not want to live by their father’s culture and marry men from the Middle East, “especially men we don’t know or love.” So they were running away from their father's home, she said in the email prosecutors read into evidence.<br>Said, who had been sought on a capital murder warrant since the slayings, was placed on the FBI's most-wanted list. He was finally arrested in August 2020 in Justin, about 35 miles (60 kilometers) northwest of Dallas. His son, Islam Said, and his brother, Yassim Said, were subsequently convicted of helping him evade arrest.
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