Man who hid father charged in Irving taxi slayings of teenage daughters is sentenced
The son of a taxi driver charged with capital murder in the shooting deaths of his two daughters in Irving was sentenced on Tuesday to 10 years in prison for helping his father dodge arrest for more than a decade.
In downtown Fort Worth, U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor also ordered that Islam Said complete three years of supervised release.
Yaser Said, who had been on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list after he was accused of killing Amina and Sarah Said in 2008, was arrested in August.
Islam Said, 32, pleaded guilty in January to conspiracy to conceal a person from arrest, concealing a person from arrest and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding.
“Islam Said prioritized the whims of his father, an alleged killer, over justice for his own sisters. Thanks to the dogged work of the FBI and its law enforcement partners, however, Mr. Said’s efforts were ultimately in vain,” Prerak Shah, the acting U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas, wrote in a statement.
Yaser Said’s brother, Yassein Said, 59, was convicted at trial in February of conspiring with Islam to conceal Yaser from arrest. Yassein Said is to be sentenced on June 4.
On the night of Jan. 1, 2008, Irving police found Amina Said, 18, hunched over in the passenger seat of her father’s taxi. Her sister, Sarah Said, 17, was in the back seat. Both had been shot multiple times.
Some relatives have said that the girls were victims of an “honor killing” because their father thought they had brought shame to the family. Authorities have declined to comment on a motive.
The criminal complaints filed in the cases of Yassein Said and Islam Said do not indicate where Yaser Said was from January 2008 until August 2017.
Nine years after the killings, investigators got a break when a maintenance worker at the Copper Canyon Apartments in Bedford spotted Yaser Said in an apartment rented by Islam Said, according to the complaints.
After the sighting, on Aug. 14, 2017, an FBI agent tried to interview Islam Said. He refused to cooperate and called his attorney. Later, authorities discovered that Islam Said called someone and told them, “we have a big problem,” according to the complaint.
Authorities obtained a search warrant for the apartment and executed it on Aug. 15, 2017 , but they did not find anyone. Investigators collected a Pall Mall cigarette butt from a trash can, a pair of eyeglasses and a toothbrush found in a luggage bag inside a closet. Test results on DNA collected from the apartment indicated that Yaser Said had been there.
In August 2020, authorities discovered that two homes were in the name of Dalal Said, one of Yassein Said’s daughters. One home was in Justin and the other in Euless. Authorities already knew that the Euless residence was the primary home of Islam Said.
Federal authorities began physical surveillance at both homes. FBI agents saw Islam Said and Yassein Said carry about five grocery bags into the Justin home.
