{"id":91943,"date":"2016-11-22T20:00:39","date_gmt":"2016-11-23T01:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/breaking911.com\/?p=91943"},"modified":"2016-11-22T20:05:02","modified_gmt":"2016-11-23T01:05:02","slug":"sole-survivor-family-killing-spree-wonders-one-left","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/breaking911.com\/sole-survivor-family-killing-spree-wonders-one-left\/","title":{"rendered":"The sole survivor of a family killing spree wonders ‘Why am I the one who was left?’"},"content":{"rendered":"
(c) 2016, The Washington Post \u00b7 Michael E. Miller<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n
Laila Siddique was on her way to examine a patient at Penn State’s Hershey Medical Center when her phone began to tremble. The 25-year-old medical student glanced at the screen. It was a text from her father.<\/p>\n
Nasir Siddique kept in close touch with his two children. He had come to the United States from Pakistan as a young man, enlisted in the Army and slowly risen through the ranks, working at the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill before retiring as a lieutenant colonel in 2010. He had traded the cigars and whiskey of his youth for a tightknit family, a large house in Bel Air, Md., and Friday prayers at a Baltimore mosque. And he’d recently landed a job as deputy environmental chief at Aberdeen Proving Ground, a century-old military base where he once served as a military officer.<\/p>\n
At 57, with a military pension, the new job, a loving wife, and a son and daughter both studying to become doctors, Nasir Siddique had many reasons to be happy.<\/p>\n
Instead, he was deeply disturbed.<\/p>\n
“Two reasons for my stress,” began his text to his daughter on Sept. 28 at 10:48 a.m. “1. Very stressful job at APG. 2. APG Commander and Director of Public Works took us to tour the inside of a very old historical house (by the main golf course) last month being prepared for demolition.”<\/p>\n
“They should not have taken us inside this very old and unsafe house at all,” he wrote. “I have been feeling different since this tour.”<\/p>\n
He’d told her about the house once before, but now he seemed more agitated.<\/p>\n
“How have you felt different since the tour?” Laila texted back.<\/p>\n
“Love you,” he answered.<\/p>\n
Her phone, normally buzzing with messages from her father, her mother, Zarqa, and her 19-year-old brother, Farhad,went quiet.<\/p>\n
When Laila left the hospital that evening, she called her dad but he didn’t answer. Neither did her mom, an aide to children with disabilities at an elementary school, or Farhad, a junior at the University of Maryland. When her brother’s roommates told her he hadn’t been seen all day, Laila called the police.<\/p>\n
It was well after midnight when there was a knock at Laila’s apartment door in Hershey, Pa. When she opened it, four strangers handed her a number to call, then sat with her as she dialed.<\/p>\n
“Your mom was found dead in her bathroom, and then your brother and father were found dead at the University of Maryland,” she recalled a detective saying. “It seems like your dad killed your mom and brother and then he killed himself.”<\/p>\n
Nearly two months later, Laila Siddique is still struggling to understand what happened. Prince George’s County police and the Harford County Sheriff’s Office believe Nasir carried out the violence. They point to physical evidence, including a gun registered to Nasir that was found in his hand and an apparent suicide note.<\/p>\n
But Laila refuses to believe that her father could be what criminologists call a “family annihilator” – someone who kills their partners and children before turning their weapon on themself. Instead, she wonders whether he could have been framed or somehow forced to commit the killings.<\/p>\n
Her family and much of her community also reject the official explanation. How, they demand, could the doting family man they knew for decades kill his wife, his son and then himself?<\/p>\n
For Laila, the doubt and grief are compounded by the fact that she is suddenly, irrevocably alone.<\/p>\n
“Why am I the one who was left?” she asked. “We were all together, all the time. It should have been all of us. I don’t get why I am still here.”<\/p>\n