A teenage boy cried on the witness stand as he told how he saved his girlfriend’s life as her parents allegedly tried to strangle her in an ‘honor killing’.
Isiah described how he punched Ihsan Ali 30 or 40 times in the head as he held his daughter, Fatima Ali, 18, on the ground in a chokehold.
‘Her face was looking pale and her eyes were starting to roll back,’ he told a Thurston County Superior Court jury in Washington on Wednesday.
When prosecutor Heather Stone asked him to elaborate, he broke down in tears and his testimony had to be stopped.
Isiah was giving evidence against Ihsan, 44, and his wife Zahraa Subhi Mohsin Ali, 40, at their attempted murder trial.
The couple are accused of trying to strangle their daughter outside Timberline High School in Lacey, Washington, on October 18 last year.
Terrifying footage first published by the Daily Mail before the trial, and shown to the court, shows Ihsan put her in a chokehold on the ground until Isiah, classmates, and bystanders rescued her.
Ihsan and Zahraa are accused of attempting to carry out a Muslim ‘honor killing’ on Fatima ‘for refusing an arranged marriage with an older man in another county’.
Isiah, pictured behind his father Victor Barnes outside court on Wednesday, cried on the witness stand as he told how he saved his girlfriend’s life as her parents allegedly tried to strangle her in an ‘honor killing’
Ihsan Ali, 44, listens on Wednesday as his daughter Fatima Ali tells the court at his attempted murder trial how he tried to choke the life out of her in an alleged ‘honor killing’
Fatima’s mother Zahraa Subhi Mohsin Ali, 40, is also on trial for attempted murder, accused of trying to finished the job after Ihsan was detained. She is pictured in court on Wednesday
Fatima earlier told the court she fled her home at 6am with just a bag of clothes and $100 hours before she was supposed to be on a one-way trip to Najaf in Iraq.
She met with her counselor at Timberline, who got her a place at Haven House, a youth crisis center, but the school didn’t provide transport.
Isiah, who was just 16 at the time, told the court he escorted Fatima to the bus stop, and Ihsan was waiting when they arrived.
‘As she was backing away you could hear him get more upset,’ he said of the argument between Fatima and her father in Arabic.
Isiah told the court he didn’t just let Ihsan take her ‘because he didn’t want to take her home’, but wasn’t asked to explain what that meant.
‘We’re walking towards the bus stop and he starts to get more aggressive. We see the bus and I try to push her a little bit so we can get ready to go, and then he grabs her,’ he continued.
‘He grabbed her shoulder and I tried to push them away from each other.
‘I look back at him and then he punches me. For a second I don’t know what happened and then I saw him grab her.’
Isiah bounced his leg as he told the court he ‘flew back’ from the force of the punch and watched as Ihsan went after Fatima, ‘spun her around’ and grabbed her by the throat.
Video showed Ihsan on the ground outside his daughters school, Timberline High School in Lacey, Washington, with her in a chokehold while her boyfriend and classmates repeatedly punch and kick him to get him to release her
Isiah, whose face can’t be published while giving evidence due to his age, on the witness stand as he gave evidence on Wednesday
Footage from the bus cameras showed Isiah and two classmates charge at Ihsan as he struggled with Fatima, and they all ended up on the ground.
Isiah demonstrated with his arms how Ihsan put Fatima in a ‘headlock’ on the ground and choked her even after she lost consciousness.
‘I start punching him as he’s choking her and other people around me are trying to get him off of her,’ he said.
‘She can’t speak… she’s gasping for air trying to get his arms off her throat… At first she was trying to fight it… but then she went limp.
‘It’s chaotic, everyone is screaming, everyone is in shock.’
The teens punched, kicked, and stomped Ihsan as he refused to let go despite the flurry of blows.
Isiah said he kept punching Ihsan until ‘his eyes closed and his grip released’ and the adults at the scene pulled his arms off her so she could be freed.
The teenager punched Ihsan so many times and so hard that he broke a finger.
Ihsan punched his daughter’s boyfriend square in the face at the start of the attack, sending him staggering back out of the frame and falling down hard on nearby concrete
Isiah demonstrated with his arms how Ihsan put Fatima in a ‘headlock’ on the ground and choked her even after she lost consciousness
Once Ihsan was restrained by passing motorist Josh Wagner, Isiah said he tried to get Fatima to her feet so they could go somewhere safe.
That was when Zahraa and Fatima’s eldest sister Haneen, 21, showed up.
‘Her mother is screaming and crying and she grabs Fatima around her throat area and is sobbing… we were confused about why she was doing that after what happened,’ Isiah told the court.
‘We were trying get her off and they fell to the ground. She was still screaming and crying and her arms were still on her throat and chest area
‘Fatima said “I can’t breathe” and I believe she was still in shock and feeling someone’s arms around her neck was… she scratched [the words] out, almost like it was a cough.’
Isiah was shown a video of Haneen confronting him and pushing her phone into his face while recording him and falsely accusing him of hitting her.
‘She’s screaming, you start talking to her and as a matter of fact at one point you pushed her hand, right?’ Ihsan’s lawyer Erik Kaeding asked during cross-examination.
‘And you were gonna hit her again but somebody stopped you, right?’ Isiah agreed: ‘Yes, sir’. Kaeding followed up: ‘So you were mad at Haneen.’
‘Yeah, she grabbed and broke my chain, she scratched my neck,’ Isiah replied.
Zahraa (second from left) and her lawyer Tim Leary (second from right) in court on Wednesday
Ihsan’s lawyer Erik Kaeding (left) cross-examined Isiah about confrontation with Ihsan
Judge Christine Schaller ruled prosecutors couldn’t bring up the arranged marriage or allow Fatima to talk in detail about a family trip to Iraq when she was 16
Isiah agreed Haneen hadn’t seen what was going on before and why her father was on the ground. Haneen is not charged with a crime.
The teenager testified that he and his classmates were able to extract Fatima from Zahraa’s grasp and she ran towards the school with im following.
‘She was scared, she wanted to get away,’ Isiah said.
Fatima, who was just 17 when she was attacked, bravely told the jury of the agonizing moments her consciousness slipped away in her father’s grasp.
The petite 5ft 1in girl weighing just 101lbs felt his arms around her throat and ‘dirt on my face’ from the ground, couldn’t breathe, and had pain in her neck.
Stone asked what Fatima was thinking as she struggled to stay alive. ‘Heartbroken for what my dad did,’ she said.
‘Did you have any fear?’ Stone asked. ‘Yes.’ ‘Fear of what?’
‘Of dying,’ Fatima choked out, her voice breaking into a sob.
She was barely able to respond ‘no’ when asked if she could say anything during the attack.
Fatima under cross-examination on Wednesday. The judge ruled that though she is now 18, she couldn’t be filmed while giving evidence as she was 17 during the incident
These are some of the cuts, welts, and broken bones the teenage girl suffered when her parents allegedly tried to strangle her in an ‘honor killing’
The teenager explained she lost consciousness four times during the attack and only has flashes of memory.
‘I could see my hand reaching my neck… because I knew my dad was choking me,’ she said of one of them.
‘I saw darkness at first. [Then] I saw Isiah and a friend standing above me.’
Fatima told the court she woke up hearing her mother saying ‘my daughter’ and felt Zahraa holding her ‘around the throat or my neck, and my chest’.
Prosecutors and witnesses alleged Zahraa was trying to finish the honor killing by strangling Fatima after Ihsan was subdued.
Fatima admitted under cross-examination that she told police she didn’t think her mother was trying to hurt her.
But she told the court it was more that she ‘didn’t want to believe’ that Zahraa would try to hurt her.
Fatima said she didn’t know how her parents usually hold her to comfort her as ‘it’s really rare for me and my mom and my dad to hug’.
The boys began punching, kicking, and stomping Ihsan as he put his daughter in a chokehold and refused to let go despite the flurry of blows
Ihsan (right) speaks with his lawyer Erik Kaeding in court on Wednesday
Fatima said she initially couldn’t get up and eventually when she was pulled away from her mother’s grasp and tried to walk away, her legs were weak.
She told the court she was trying to get away from mother and sister because ‘I was afraid’.
She said she couldn’t have gotten away from the chokeholds if she was alone, but wasn’t asked if that meant she would have died.
Fatima ran into the school office, pursued by her mother. ‘I told them he (Ihsan) was trying to kill me,’ she said.
Prosecutors did not ask the teenager about the years of abuse she told police her father subjected her and her siblings to, or about Ihsan’s alleged threats to kill her.
Judge Christine Schaller ruled prosecutors couldn’t bring up the arranged marriage or allow Fatima to talk in detail about a family trip to Iraq when she was 16.
She only told the court ‘I felt unsafe’ when she was there.
Seconds later it appeared Zahraa had started her attack as the girl seemed to be back on the ground where witnesses alleged she also tried to kill her
Ihsan in police bodycam footage sitting a patrol car. His jacket was torn in the struggle and dirt pressed into one side of his face during the attack
Fatima told police in her interview last year that the trip made her fearful of being sent there to be married off and never allowed to return to the US.
Witnesses, including Isiah and Fatima’s classmates, gave evidence earlier in the trial about what they saw during the horrifying attack.
‘His arm was wrapped around her throat and she couldn’t breathe, her lips were turning purple,’ one student told the court.
‘I tried to help her, but I wasn’t strong enough and a lot of other students stepped in at that point.’
Another classmate testified: She was grabbing her dad’s hands at her neck, her eyes were rolling back and she was a little pale.
‘It looked like she was not going to be barely conscious for any longer, it was very scary.’
Classmates also testified they saw Zahraa grab Fatima by the neck, similar to how her husband did moments earlier.
‘When she (Fatima) got away from her father, she tried to run, and her mom had grabbed her and she was grabbing her by the throat,’ one said.
Josh Wagner, seen in the bus video, told the court how he stopped his black Dodge Ram in the middle of the road, got out, and hustled over to the brawl
Wagner explained how he restrained Ihsan on the ground until police arrived
John Denicola, a bus driver who stopped to help and whose cameras recorded the melee, told the court how he frantically tried the save the girl.
‘Obviously, she was in distress, her eyes were rolling into the back of her head, you could tell she was not able to breathe,’ he said.
Josh Wagner, a motorist who stopped his car in the middle of the road and ran to help, described how he freed Fatima from her father’s chokehold.
‘Her face was changing color as she was being choked… she was gonna lose consciousness if it continued… it was very obvious she was being choked,’ he told the court.
Both Ihsan and Zahraa are charged with second-degree attempted murder and attempted kidnapping, along with lesser crimes.
They have been behind bars since soon after the attack on bonds of $1 million and $500,000.
The trial is expected to continue for the rest of the month.
