5
The CEO Found With His Head Sawn Off
5
The CEO Found With His Head Sawn Off
People who live in a $2 million luxury condo on Manhattan’s Lower East Side probably feel thoroughly safe in their own building. But let’s dispel any feeling of security you’ll ever have by sharing with you what the cameras in one such building picked up from July 13. A resident, 33-year-old tech CEO Fahim Saleh, gets into the elevator. He’s joined by a man dressed in a black suit, latex gloves, and a black mask. Fahim uses his key fob to send the elevator directly to his own apartment, and the other guy touches a button too, but he’s just pretending. Fahim walks through the doors into his unit, and the man follows him. The last image of Fahim is the killer tasing him.
The next day, Fahim’s cousin came by, having not heard from him a bit and wanting to check in. She keyed into the apartment, and this is your last chance to scroll away from this story to something more pleasant. She saw Fahim in the apartment all right — at least, she saw his torso. His arms and legs were cut off. So was his head. These body parts were in plastic bags. An electric saw had evidently sliced them off him; it was still plugged in and bloody.
Judging from how fresh the cuts were, police surmise that the killer had been in the apartment chopping the body up when he heard the cousin arriving. So he fled through a back door, leaving her with both the most traumatic experience of her life and also a narrow escape from being murdered herself. He’d tased Fahim the previous day, stabbed him to death, then returned later to properly dispose of the body. As for who this costumed killer was, no one knew, but it sounded like a professional hit man. Maybe this had something to do with Fahim’s job. Fahim had been speaking out about the Nigerian government overregulating his company — maybe this was international revenge?
It’s too early to say for certain, but police now think: No, the killer was probably instead the man who bought that electric saw the morning after the murder, Fahim’s personal assistant Tyrese Haspil. Tyrese had embezzled $90,000 from Fahim, say police, and when Fahim discovered this, he … didn’t report him, just let him pay it back whenever he could, because Fahim was an incredibly nice guy. Then it seems Tyrese found an alternative to paying the money back. Police did arrest Tyrese quickly, but they couldn’t identify him from the security video alone because he’d been wearing a mask. So, now you have two groups of people to fear in your everyday life. People wearing masks, and people not wearing masks.
