A woman has been sentenced for strangling her two young children in the bathroom of her Fife home, killing her 4-year-old daughter while her husband was out buying groceries.
Pierce County Superior Court Judge Grant Blinn on Friday ordered Hina Sadia to serve 46 years, eight months in prison for the murder of her daughter, Aleeza Shehzad, and the attempted murder of her toddler son. She was convicted of those charges in a jury trial in May.
The sentence brings to a close a horrific case that puzzled police and led to conflicting opinions from psychologists on the mother's mental health and ability to stand trial.
Sadia, 35, was arrested on May 17, 2020, after she called 911 and said she was a housewife who had just killed her child in the bathtub, and she was about to kill her 2-year-old boy. According to court records, Fife Police Department officers found the girl unresponsive in a tub while her brother sobbed at her feet.
The daughter was in critical condition at MultiCare Mary Bridge Children's Hospital when prosecutors charged Sadia the next day with two counts of first-degree attempted murder. Prosecutors said one charge was increased to first-degree murder more than a year later when the girl was declared brain dead and taken off of life support. An autopsy found her cause of death was brain swelling due to lack of oxygen.
After Sadia was arrested, detectives interviewed her at the police headquarters through an interpreter. According to court records, Sadia moved to the United States in 2017 from Pakistan to join her husband after her son was born, and the family lived in a housing development near Five Acre Park.
Sadia told detectives she tried to kill her children because she couldn't do anything for her kids, and she thought they wouldn't be able to do anything for society, according to prosecutors' transcript of the interview. She said she'd never thought about doing it before. Sadia called herself a "bad mother" and said she wasn't able to take care of them, but she also said she didn't have any financial issues.
"They will not be able to do anything good or they will not have any status in the society, so it was better they die," Sadia told detectives through an interpreter.
Sadia's husband later told a forensic psychologist she seemed normal in the weeks before the murder. The night before, the family had dinner on the Tacoma waterfront, and the husband said Sadia seemed happy. He also said there weren't any issues in their marriage, and, according to prosecutors, Sadia adamantly denied her husband causing her to murder her daughter in phone calls with friends and family from the Pierce County Jail.
Psychologists disagree on defendant's mental health
The reason Sadia gave to detectives for the murder is not much of an explanation. A California psychologist retained by the defense evaluated the defendant and offered a different one.
Diana Barnes, who specializes in women's reproductive mental health, wrote that in her opinion, Sadia "suffered from a postpartum psychotic episode which created a break in reality that caused her behavior to be governed by auditory hallucinations commanding her to kill her children." Barnes diagnosed her with bipolar disorder, most recent episode manic, severe with psychotic features, with peripartum onset, meaning it would have begun during pregnancy or in the weeks after she gave birth.
Barnes found that Sadia didn't understand the nature or quality of the acts she was charged with, and she didn't have the capacity to understand killing her children was wrong. The assertion would mean that the defendant wouldn't be sane enough to stand trial.
Two more psychologists evaluated Sadia.
One, a Western State Hospital doctor, agreed with Barnes that Sadia wasn't able to tell right from wrong due to a mental disease or defect but offered a different diagnosis and said Sadia was capable of understanding the nature and quality of her acts. The third psychologist, a private-practice doctor in Olympia called by prosecutors, disagreed entirely. In his report, he said he couldn't conclude Sadia suffered from a mental disease or defect, and he found she could both understand the nature and quality of her acts and tell right from wrong.
Fending off a defense motion to have the defendant acquitted after she pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, prosecutors argued that Sadia's "excuse" for killing her daughter — that voices told her to — never came up in interviews with detectives or in phone calls with friends and family from Pierce County Jail. Her husband also told one psychologist that Sadia had never reported hearing voices.
Prosecutors said even if she was suffering from a mental disorder, Sadia's own words showed she knew her victims were her children and what she was doing was wrong. They noted that when she first met with her attorney, Sadia asked when she would be executed by hanging and became stressed when it was explained to her that wasn't how the U.S. judicial system worked.
"Her hallucinations did not tell her she was strangling a snake or a demon," prosecutors wrote. "Her hallucinations did not convince her these were not her beloved children. The voices did not tell her what she was doing was not sinful or that her actions were not wrong in the eyes of the law."
Ultimately, the court found Sadia fit to stand trial. Still, the defense argued prior to sentencing that Sadia's mental condition impaired her ability to distinguish right from wrong, and she should receive 20 years in prison, below the standard sentencing range but in line with a mandatory minimum sentence. According to court records, she has no prior criminal history.
Sadia's attorneys from the Department of Assigned Counsel said that although prosecutors' psychologist didn't diagnose Sadia with a mental disorder, the doctor indicated in his testimony that she was likely suffering from major depressive disorder when she killed her daughter.
"Over approximately two years Ms. Sadia descended into profound and overwhelming depression which was debilitating and effected every realm of her life," the defense attorneys wrote in a sentencing memo. "At the time of the offenses, Ms. Sadia was experiencing severe auditory and visual hallucinations and could not ground her thought processes in reality."
