A young woman from Orlando, Florida, Fatiha Marzan, 21, was arrested and charged with first-degree murder after she stabbed her younger sister, Sayma, 20, to death for flirting with her long-time boyfriend.
According to court records in Orange County, Fatiha entered a not-guilty plea.
Fatiha killed her sister Sayma in the bed they both shared in their family home in Orlando at around 4:30 am on Monday, September 26.
Fatiha had learned that her younger sister and her long-distance boyfriend, with whom Fatiha had been in a relationship with for about five years, were flirting behind her back. They were messaging through a video game they played together called Valorant, and were chatting via the game’s messaging feature.
Fatiha admitted to Orange County sheriffs that she had contemplated killing her sister Sayma for over two weeks. She bought a dagger knife set from Amazon two weeks earlier, after she saw their messages. She told investigators that her trigger was the fact that her boyfriend had told her sister that he was in love with her.
She kept the knife set hidden in a closet and waited for the perfect opportunity. Two weeks later, Fatiha took the knives from their hiding place after her entire family had gone to sleep. She stabbed Sayma about three times in the heart – a cold-blooded attack.
Hours later, at 7:30 pm, Orange County police officers responded to a 911 call about a possible death from a house in Azalea Park, Orlando. Fatiha told 911 operators that she believed Sayma had died after she stabbed her.
Authorities pronounced Sayma Marzan dead, 20 minutes after arriving at the crime scene.
The police report stated that the murder suspect knew that she had to wait until everyone in the house was sound asleep to stab her sister, because she did not want her family to hear her commit the gruesome murder. It continues to say that Fatiha was in sound mind when she decided to kill Sayma, and she still understood what she was doing when she was stabbing her.
Witnesses told the police that Fatiha felt betrayed and angered by her sister and did not think her sister’s relationship with her boyfriend was right. Fatiha told the police that she even contemplated taking her own life, but one of her siblings talked her out of it.
Fatiha was arrested and is detained at the Orange County jail without bond.
In the last decade, domestic violence murders in Florida have risen to around 200 every year. The Florida Law Enforcement department shows that from the late 1990s, about a quarter of homicide victims reported yearly were either killed by their family members or people they lived with. Last year, Orange County recorded 117 murders, a slight decrease from 138 in 2020.
In August this year, a man from Florida’s Lake District murdered his wife and three kids before killing himself. In April, another man, a physical therapist, was found guilty of killing his wife, three kids, and family dog in 2020 in their home in Central Florida.
