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Each school day usually went like clockwork in the home of 14-year-old Aya Altantawi.
Each morning, Aya and her two siblings had their alarm clocks set to the same time so they could leave their Farmington Hills, Michigan home by 6:30 a.m. Missing this deadline meant they’d be left behind, as reported in the Dateline: Secrets Uncovered episode titled “The Shadow in the Window.”
However, on the morning of August 21, 2017, things took an unexpected turn. Aya’s mother, Nada Huranieh, was nowhere to be seen, prompting Aya to search for her. What she found was alarming—a guest bedroom window was open, and beside it lay a ladder and some cleaning supplies.
Huranieh lay motionless on the patio below the window, seemingly having tumbled to her death.
Initially perceived as a tragic accident, the subsequent investigation revealed a darker truth that eventually fractured Aya’s family.
Who was Nada Huranieh?
Huranieh began her life in Syria. It was there that she met her future husband, Dr. Bassel Altantawi, and together the young couple, both devout Muslims, moved to the United States. Bassel started his own urgent care clinic and Huranieh raised the couple’s three children.
“My mom was a lot more extraverted, loved going to events, that sort of thing,” Aya recalled, adding that her dad was more of a “drag him out of the house” kind of person.
Friends remember Huranieh for her big smile and sweet and loving nature. She’d married young and as her life in America got underway, Huranieh found herself yearning for independence outside of her husband’s control.
“She wasn’t really being submissive anymore,” Aya recalled. “She wasn’t being like, ‘Yeah, I’ll do whatever you want.’ ‘Oh, I won’t go to work’ or ‘I won’t get an education,’ that sort of thing.”
About 18 months before her death, the couple got into a screaming match. Aya told Dateline that her dad was trying to close the door on her mom, who had reached her hand between the door and the wall. Bassel slammed the door, injuring Huranieh’s hand in the process. Aya called the police and her dad was charged with domestic violence. He later pleaded no contest, but the marriage fell apart soon after and Huranieh began a life of her own.
She got a job as a personal trainer at the gym — something Aya says her father hated — and stopped wearing a traditional hijab. She was even casually dating someone from the gym.
What happened to Nada Huranieh?
Huranieh’s life came to a tragic end before her daughter Aya made that devastating discovery on the patio of their sprawling 10,000 square foot mansion on August 21, 2017.
Her body lay just below an open window, next to a wet rag. A ladder with a bottle of Tilex on it sat in the guest room next to the window.
“I remember screaming but it, it’s like in those movies or where you read in the books where it’s like the character’s like, ‘’Oh I screamed, but I didn’t realize it was coming from me,’” Aya recalled.
Aya ran to her older brother Muhammad Altantawi’s room to get help and together the pair raced downstairs, while Aya dialed 911.
“We need an ambulance… Oh my God,” Aya told the dispatcher.
The dispatcher instructed Muhammad on how to do CPR and Aya met the police car at the road. She was captured in dashcam video frantically running up the driveway as she led an officer to her mom. But it was too late. Huranieh was already dead.
Authorities conclude Nada Huranieh’s death was a murder
Initially, detectives considered the possibility that Huranieh had woken up early to do some cleaning and plunged to her death out the open window.
But that theory was soon discarded after the medical examiner, Dr. Ljubisa J. Dragovic, concluded that Huranieh had actually died before she ever fell from the window.
That conclusion was corroborated after investigators looked through the six surveillance cameras at the home that had been recording that morning. Although the cameras didn’t show Huranieh coming out of the window, one did capture her body falling to the ground.
Detectives noticed in the footage that there was a light on in the guest bedroom casting shadows on the grass outside. The shadows appeared to capture a person with short hair lifting something heavy to the window, just moments before Huranieh’s body hit the ground.
“I said, ‘God, this cannot be, you see the lifeless body being disposed over the window sill,” Dragovic said of the stunning footage.
Given their tumultuous past, Huranieh’s friends initially believed that Bassel had carried out the killing, but at the time of the murder, he had been on probation for that domestic violence charge and was wearing a tracking device that put him miles away at the time of the crime.
Nada Huranieh’s son Muhammad Altantawi becomes a suspect
Detectives soon focused on the only male at the home that morning: Huranieh’s own 16-year-old son Muhammad.
He initially denied any involvement in the murder, but a detective pressed again, asking him, “You’re telling me right now that you weren’t in the room — like maybe helping her clean the windows, or hold the ladder, or anything like that when this happened, when this accident happened?”
This time, he changed his story, first telling detectives that he’d seen his mom that morning and had gotten her cleaning spray. He then claimed that he was holding the ladder when she toppled out of the window. Detectives, however, knew that Nada had been killed before she fell out the window.
Dragovic said that evidence found in her lungs suggested she’d died of “nasal oral blockage,” suggesting someone may have put a pillow or cloth over her face, then carried her to the window and tossed her out.
And Huranieh’s friends told detectives that Muhammad blamed his mom for everything that had gone wrong in his parents’ marriage, and that his low opinion of her only got worse as she got “more Americanized.”
Muhammad Altantawi charged with mother’s murder
Muhammad was arrested and charged in his mother’s death, but it would be years before the case went to trial.
His defense attorney Michael Schiano argued all the way to the Michigan Supreme Court that Muhammad’s conversation with detectives shouldn’t be admissible, claiming that investigators were feeding Muhammad, a minor at the time, possibilities of what could have happened. Prosecutors eventually agreed to keep it out of the trial and focused on the other evidence.
As they were waiting for trial, Aya remained largely in the dark about how her mother was killed.
She believed her father had somehow played a role in convincing Muhammad to carry out the act. Cell phone data did show the father and son called or texted each other 20 times the morning of the murder, but there was no concrete evidence to link Bassel to the crime and he was never charged.
Aya Altantawi chooses foster care over living with her dad
Aya opted to go into the foster care system rather than live with her father.
“I’d seen what he’d done my mom,” she told Dateline correspondent Keith Morrison. “He was literally just a stranger to me who was blood related and could physically hurt me because he hurt my mom multiple times growing up and… I wasn’t going to let myself be in that position.”
At the 2022 trial, prosecutors focused on Huranieh and her son’s disintegrating relationship, pointing out that the teen had even labeled her contact name in his phone as “Dog.”
They believed Muhammad killed Huranieh to keep her from testifying at an upcoming divorce deposition against his father. They also showed jurors surveillance footage that appeared to show Muhammad stop his CPR efforts, despite continuing to count out loud with the dispatcher. And they showed that footage of the shadow in the window.
Aya took the stand to describe the strained relationship Muhammad had with his mom.
“When the divorce case started, he was very against it because he had kind of saw it as my mother was trying to take my father’s money, my father’s house, um, destroy our family, rip our family apart,” she told the court.
Muhammad’s defense team argued that he was planning to move in with his dad and had no motive to kill his mom. They also argued that there was a complete lack of physical evidence to link him to the crime and said that the shadow video was too vague to determine anything.
It wasn’t enough to convince a jury, however.
What happened to Muhammad Altantawi?
Muhammad was convicted of first-degree premeditated murder for killing his mother, Huranieh, and sentenced to 35 to 60 years behind bars.
Although Aya remained composed throughout her family’s years-long ordeal, she finally lost it at the sentencing hearing.
After her father spoke glowingly about Muhammad and barely mentioned her mom, she followed him out into the hall of the courthouse and let all her frustration out.
“You are absolutely nothing to me,” she could be heard screaming at her dad. “Get the f–k out.”
She later recounted the outburst to Morrison.
“I had just had enough and all this pent up anger, they had absolutely no remorse, no empathy for anyone else in this situation but themselves. I mean, how are you human?” she said.
Today, she has no contact with her father and is focused on the future.
After graduating college in just three years, Aya plans to go to law school to help vulnerable children in situations similar to what she went through.
Watch Season 15 of Dateline: Secrets Uncovered, which airs new episodes on Wednesday nights at 8 p.m. ET on .
