Man gets 212 years in prison for drowning autistic sons in car

Officers stand near the water's edge at a harbor, with boats in the background.

March 11, 2021 1:29 PM PT

Fishermen at a San Pedro dock heard tires screeching on the pavement as a car sped off the wharf and sailed 50 feet through the air before splashing into the harbor.

Rabab Diab, who was in the Honda sedan’s front passenger seat, testified later about the terrifying moment.

“I started to scream,” she recalled.

Diab’s two severely autistic sons, Abdelkarim Elmezayen, 8, and Elhassan, 13, drowned in the car’s back seat that afternoon in April 2015.

Their father, Ali F. Elmezayen, was at the wheel. He was sentenced Thursday to 212 years in prison for murdering his sons and attempting to kill their mother in a plot to collect on insurance policies.

Calling Elmezayen’s crimes “evil and diabolical,” U.S. District Judge John F. Walter said he’d rarely come across a case of such “despicable” conduct. He said he could only imagine the horror and pain of the boys, strapped in the back seat as the car filled with water and suffocated them.

“Only a truly sick, depraved individual would commit such a crime,” Walter said, adding that the Hawthorne resident had “stomped on the gas” as he drove off the wharf, then climbed through his open window and left his family to drown.

Especially troubling, the judge said, was that Elmezayen worked for two years to carry out the murder plot. Over time, he bought eight life and accidental-death insurance policies providing $3.4 million in coverage, then waited to commit the murders to avoid raising suspicions of fraud.

“In my view, this demonstrates the vicious and callous nature of his crimes,” Walter said.

Seated in the second row of the courtroom was Diab, wearing a navy blue hijab, and the couple’s surviving 20-year-old son, Elhussein Elmezayen, who stepped up to a microphone and berated his father.

Speaking on behalf of himself and his mother, he accused his father of leaving them in “misery and poverty,” squandering his savings on his “low-life family” in Egypt. “We wish my brothers didn’t die for your financial gain,” he said.

“I hope you know I don’t want anything to do with you anymore,” said Elhussein, who was away at an overnight camp the day his younger brothers drowned. “Don’t call me. Don’t write me.”

Elmezayen, 45, wearing a beige jail jumpsuit and with his ankles and wrists shackled, declined to address the court. Apart from occasionally glaring at his distraught son, he sat expressionless as he listened through a headset to an Arabic interpreter.

Elmezayen’s attorney, federal public defender Cuauhtemoc Ortega, declined to comment.

Prosecutors had recommended the 212-year sentence, the maximum allowed by law. Elmezayen was convicted of mail and wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering at a nine-day trial in 2019. Although federal prosecutors said they lacked jurisdiction to charge him with murder, the killing of his sons and attempted drowning of his ex-wife were central to his scheme to defraud the insurance companies.

“These are two children, 8 and 13 years old, that he had raised with his wife, and to turn around and then murder them in cold blood for insurance money is the most horrific thing that I can think of,” Tracy Wilkison, acting U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, said outside the courthouse.

The younger boy was still alive when firefighters got him out of the water 10 minutes after the car sank but died later at the hospital, according to prosecutors.

At the sentencing, Walter praised federal authorities for taking up the case after the L.A. County district attorney’s office decided in 2017 not to prosecute Elmezayen. “It appeared the defendant would actually get away with these murders,” Walter said.

Eight months after a federal grand jury indicted Elmezayen, the D.A.’s office reversed course, charging him with capital murder and attempted murder. A spokesman for District Atty. George Gascon said Wednesday the office was “evaluating the next step.”

Elmezayen and Diab met as college students in Cairo in 1996, married three years later and moved to Los Angeles in 2000. They filed for divorce in 2009 but kept living together even as both pursued sham marriages to regularize their immigration status.

By then, Elmezayen had been physically and mentally abusing Diab for years. He slapped, kicked and choked her, she testified at the trial. He threatened to gouge her eyes out.

The oldest of their three sons, Elhussein, testified that he once saw his father beating his mother in a laundry room. He also recalled him menacing her with a butcher’s knife, “something you would use to cut steak or watermelon with.”

The younger brothers’ autism placed enormous stress on the family, who lived in a cramped home in Watts and struggled with chronic financial troubles, according to testimony at the trial. Both boys were hyperactive and required diapers throughout their lives.

On April 9, 2015, Elmezayen suggested to Diab that they take their two younger sons to lunch at a restaurant in Inglewood. After lunch, he told them they should stop by a seafood market on the San Pedro wharf to buy fish. They pulled into a parking lot, where Elmezayen said he wanted to get a close look at a passing ship, Diab testified.

A couple of commercial fishermen in the lot told the trial jury they heard the screeching tires and a big thump near Berth 73. They turned to see the Honda hurl into the water at roughly 30 miles per hour.

“I saw a car in the air,” fisherman Anthony Palazzolo of San Pedro testified. It hit the water, “bounced a few times and submerged.”

Diab told jurors she watched Elmezayen climb out the window, within seconds, to escape the car.

Unable to swim, she feared she would die. “I started to feel that death is very close,” she recalled at the trial. “So I started to recite my prayers.”

Witnesses saw Elmezayen quickly surface and swim to a ladder on the wharf. He did nothing to rescue the boys or their mother, they testified.

When Diab managed to extricate herself from the car and get her head above water, “She was screaming hysterically — ‘my kids, my kids,’” Palazzolo recalled.

Another fisherman tossed Diab a life preserver.

Over the next several months, Elmezayen collected more than $260,000 in insurance proceeds and laundered it to hide the money from Diab. Prosecutors say he sent most of it to Egypt, buying a boat and a big house on the Nile.

On Thursday, Walter ordered him to pay the insurers $261,751 in restitution.