A Hit Job on Mom

Cultural Enrichment News


Most of our cultural enrichment stories seem to come from Europe, but the USA certainly has its share. This story from Texas involves two culture enrichers in high school who conspired to kill one of their mothers, all because…

…The boy objected to his curfew.

To make matters even worse, the matricidal Pakistani youth had been a model student and citizen. He had volunteered with the police, and was planning a local law enforcement internship.

But then mean ol’ Mom had to go and ruin everything. According to My Fox Houston:

Police: Teen Hired Classmate to Kill Mom

HOUSTON — On what seemed like an average day at HISD’s Lee High School, the buzz in the hallways centered on the two classmates arrested and charged with capital murder.

“I don’t believe it,” said one high school senior. “I can’t believe it.”

Yet, Danish Minhas and Nur Mohamed are jailed and due in court Thursday morning for the murder of 43-year-old Tabassum Khan. Khan was Minhas’s mother.

“Nur Mohamed confessed to stabbing Khan several dozen times,” said Sgt. Brian Harris of the Houston Police Department.

According to police, Mohamed is a Somalian-born student who was recently caught with drugs on campus. His friendship with Minhas, a Pakistani-born senior who made good grades and worked in Lee High School’s administrative office, blossomed in Spanish class.

– – – – – – – –

On the surface, they seemed like an odd match. Classmates knew Mohamed as the guy who brought drugs to school. They knew Minhas as the guy who made the morning announcements over the campus intercom.

Even the Houston police knew of Minhas. On the day his mother was killed, Minhas was supposed to report to HPD Headquarters to interview for an internship. It would have been his second interview for the spot.

“Danish Minhas was in the law enforcement community,” said Harris. “He received several leadership awards.”

But according to police, Minhas confessed to recruiting Mohamed to kill his mother. Police found her dead in her apartment back in November.

The motive?

Investigators say Minhas simply didn’t want to follow her house rules.

“These were not unusual restrictions- curfew, be home at night, stay off the freeway- very simple rules any parent that’s responsible would ask their child to do,” said Harris.



For a complete listing of previous enrichment news, see The Cultural Enrichment Archives.

Hat tip: Takuan Seiyo.

4 thoughts on “A Hit Job on Mom

  1. First, the obligatory (for me) sarcasm. What’s the fuss? So the young “man” damaged some household property; it’s not as though he’d killed an actual person. Nothing to wreck his whole life over. //Sarc off

    In the late 1960’s, as a very low-level radio-intercept intelligence analyst in the U.S. Air Force, I was posted for 18 months to a listening station the United States maintained with the Pakistani government just outside Peshawar, Pakistan, in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. One morning, we awoke to read, in the local English-language newspaper, a small item – no more than ten lines, single column – relating that a local 12-year-old boy had shot his mother to death because she had failed to serve him the breakfast cereal he had demanded. These news were so incomprehensively alien to us American youths (mostly under 25), we treated them almost as a joke. Several of us made a point of insuring the mess sergeant was presented a copy of the article. As I recall, he was not as amused as we had been.

    The universal experience of the men I worked with then was that, in the homes we had grown up in, nutritious food of adequate caloric content was cooked and served – by The Mother – at relatively set and regular times of the day, and our options were either to show up (on time) and eat it, with gratitude or silence, or skip that particular meal and wait for the next one. My father did that – often congratulating The Mother for her excellent performance or, at least, her effort –, and I learned to do it, too. It did not often occur to me, when I was a child, even to complain about the meals The Mother had cooked, much less protest in any more vigorous way. Sometimes, I was gently (or not) reminded that uncountable millions of children in sundry parts of the world – especially China, the Koreas, and Africa – would be piteously grateful for the scraps we fed to the dog and that my portion could be, in future, offered to them instead of to me. (That tactic did not have to be employed by my parents after I was seven or eight years of age. I’d modeled my father by that point and learned that treating The Mother with respect was what male people did; so did I.)

    I never learned what, if anything, happened to the Pakistani (Muslim) boy who had murdered his mother. The wonder of the initial article about the killing was that it had appeared in the newspaper at all; they must have needed filler that slow-news morning. Much later, I came to realize that such treatment of women – and far worse – was standard practice for the culture we found, intuitively then, so foreign to our own attitudes and behaviors. We did not understand at the time, but the casually murdered woman of the brief filler story had been merely one of numerous female slaves in the household that boy had grown up in. He had never observed any man treating any one of them with respect. His “crime” was no more serious than if he had injured the family mule; less than if he had harmed a more valuable horse.

    Ah, the manifold wonders of the Islamic worldview continue to amaze and delight us all.

  2. I think they skipped their madrassas. Seriously, it’s all there in Exodus – Honour your father and your mother, that you may have a long life in the land which the Lord, your God, is giving you (Exodus 20:12).

    Plainer language I can’t imagine.

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