Sandeela Kanwal

Sandeela Kanwal was murdered by her father, an act of filicide, in an honor killing in Clayton County, Georgia, in the Atlanta metropolitan area, on July 6, 2008. Background: Kanwal worked at a Wal-Mart, while her father, Chaudry Rashid, born in Pakistan, and holding United States permanent residency, owned a restaurant in East Point, Georgia that served pizza. At the time Rashid was married to a woman who was not Kanwal's mother. Rashid's main languages were Punjabi and Urdu. Kanwal and her father lived in a house in Clayton County, near Jonesboro, with their respective spouses and family members. Kanwal wed her husband in Gujrat, Punjab, Pakistan on March 14, 2002. In November 2005, Kanwal and her brother purchased the Clayton County house. Circa April 2008 Kanwal and her husband held a marriage ceremony in Pakistan, but the two moved to different cities in the U.S. after her wedding, with the husband moving to Chicago. She resided with her father and did not see her husband after arriving in the U.S. On April 15, they separated, and she filed for divorce on July 1. In addition to the divorce, she sought to have a new romantic relationship, something her father disliked. A police report stated that from circa May until Kanwal's death, the father and daughter did not communicate with one another. The day of her death, while the father was driving his daughter back to the house from the Wal-Mart, the two had an argument. Crime and punishment: On Sunday July 6, 2008, Kanwal's father strangled her with a bungee cord. Her body was left in a bedroom in the house's second floor. Rashid burned the murder weapon and flushed the ashes down the toilet, so authorities never found the murder weapon. She was 25 and he was 54. The killer's wife called police after leaving the house, because she heard screaming in a language incomprehensible to her. Rashid experienced a seizure upon his arrest and was jailed after being hospitalized briefly. The arrest warrant stated that the father said that the divorce caused the family to lose honor. Due to Rashid's lack of English fluency, he had a court-appointed translator. He expressed a desire to follow Islamic dietary laws while in the county jail. In the trial Rashid's legal team admitted that he committed homicide, but stated that he had no plans to do so and was only spurred by momentary anger. Rashid's lawyers argued that it was not an honor killing. Rashid was convicted of felony and malice murder and aggravated assault in May 2011, a decision that took jurors four hours. He got a life imprisonment sentence with parole eligibility. Rashid appealed his conviction on the basis that it was wrong for jurors to review footage of his interviews held at a police station. In 2013 the Georgia Supreme Court upheld Rashid's conviction.