Monday, September 6, 2010

Fairfax, VA: Murder Yields 14-Year Sentence

Woman sentenced for killing boyfriend.

By Bonnie Hobbs
Monday, September 06, 2010

Before his client was sentenced for killing her boyfriend, last year, inside her Centre Ridge apartment, defense attorney Peter Greenspun asked the court for mercy.

“It was a domestic incident,” he said. “Mrs. Tizon is not a general risk to the community.”

But Deputy Commonwealth’s Attorney Kathy Stott disagreed. “She is 64 and has no prior criminal record,” said Stott. “But this court cannot ignore the fact that, on Aug. 15, 2009, this defendant fired two shots into the victim, ending his life at age 34.”

After a four-day trial in May, a jury found Centreville’s Maria De Las Mercedes Tizon guilty of second-degree murder and use of a firearm in the commission of a felony and recommended she receive 14 years in prison. And on Aug. 20, Fairfax County Circuit Court Judge Dennis Smith imposed the full sentence.

The victim was Alexandria resident Ahmed Chouaib, who’d come to the U.S. from Morocco in 2002. He and Tizon had met at Inova Fairfax Hospital when they’d both worked in its cafeteria, and they’d been involved romantically for three or four years.

At Tizon’s trial, her neighbor, Pam Parnell, told what happened, the day of the murder. Parnell had just returned home from work when there was a knock at her door. “Maria was crying, so I opened the door and stepped out,” testified Parnell. “When I asked what was wrong, she said, ‘I shot my boyfriend; I killed him.’ Then she pointed down to a gun outside my door.”

Parnell took Tizon inside her apartment and called 911. “Maria was really shaken,” she said. “I asked, ‘Did he hit you?’ and she said, ‘He pushed me in the heart.’ Then she lost it and was crying and rocking back and forth.”

When police arrived, Parnell directed them to Tizon’s apartment, some 15 feet away, where they found Chouaib’s body. But there were no signs of a struggle.

Parnell said Tizon never denied shooting him. “While I was on the phone with 911, Maria said, ‘They should take me,’” said Parnell. “She was very emotional.” The neighbor also noted that Tizon had no injuries.

After seeing the body, Police Officer William Coulter asked Tizon what had happened. He testified that she answered, ‘He messed with my head; he takes my car and never returns it.’”

Explaining a possible motive for the murder, Officer Marta Goodwin also testified, repeating spontaneous statements Tizon had made to her. Said Goodwin: “She said [Chouaib] took her car to see other women and had assaulted her and been violent toward her.” However, no evidence of any maltreatment of Tizon at Chouaib’s hands was presented.

Police found the victim’s body, half in the bathroom and half in the hallway of Tizon’s home. He’d been shot twice, and one bullet was still in him. “The gun found outside Parnell’s apartment was the one that fired the bullets that killed him,” said Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Erin Mellen, during the trial. “On July 8, five weeks earlier, Tizon bought that gun.”

Dr. Shane Chittenden, with the Virginia Medical Examiner’s Office, performed the autopsy on Chouaib and testified that the first bullet entered above the right side of his chest. The second bullet, he said, entered from his back. Chittenden also determined that both bullets were fired from no more than 3 feet away.

The weapon used was a Taurus .38 special, double-action revolver, and firearms expert Gary Arnsten testified that, for Chouaib to be shot twice, Tizon had to fire the gun two, separate times.

When Tizon returned to court for sentencing, Aug 20, a year had passed since the tragedy. But time hadn’t dulled the pain still felt by Chouaib’s friends, and two of them took the stand at the outset of the proceedings.

First was an elderly man named Omar Moufti, who was retired and had taken an interest in helping Chouaib, who had shown kindness to both him and his wife. “I knew Ahmed six years,” said Moufti. “I discussed his college courses with him, and I told him it was better to work for himself than for others, so he and another man started their own gutter-cleaning business.”

On snowy days, said Moufti, Chouaib cleared off Moufti’s and his wife’s cars before they even got up. Crying, he said, “There’s no day goes by that I do not think about how this young man’s life was wasted. I did not have a son of my own and I thought of him as a son.”

Under questioning from Greenspun, Moufti said he’d never met Tizon and that Chouaib never told him about his intimate relationship with her because “he knew that I’d object to it vehemently.”

Another friend, Abdelhamid Ja, knew Chouaib’s family in Morocco for 20 years and said Chouaib “was like my family here. We did everything together. If I was sick, he’d take care of me. I’m missing him all the time.”

Stott then asked Judge Smith to impose the jury’s sentence recommendation — 11 years for murder, plus a mandatory three years for the firearms charge — in its entirety. She said the 11 years is close to the low end of the state sentencing guidelines and “it’s not unreasonable, based on all the evidence before this court. Ahmed Chouaib had a positive impact on his community and his friends, and they are less because he is gone.”

Greenspun said Tizon had just retired, two weeks before the incident. He said the shooting “wasn’t malice, but happened out of a passionate relationship between [the couple].”

Tizon then stood and broke down into tears while apologizing to her family, the court and everyone involved in the case. “I’ve been working all my life and have never had any situation like this,” she said. “I’m very sorry for my actions; please have mercy on me.”

Smith noted that she’d led a good life and had made contributions to society. But, he added, “You felt like you were being wronged by [Chouaib] and you intended to kill him. Your relationship was problematic; you felt abused in it and took action.”

In sentencing Tizon, said the judge, he considered her possible rehabilitation, but he also had to punish her for what she did. “You took a life intentionally, and that’s the worst thing someone can do,” said Smith. “I don’t know that you might not do it again.”

Smith told her that the jurors represented a group of individuals drawn from the community, and “they gave that 11 years thought. I don’t find [that sentence] to be out of line regarding appropriateness and, independently, that’s about what I’d have given you, too.”

He then imposed the whole 14 years, plus three years post-release supervision. “You have a right to appeal,” he told Tizon. “And you are remanded to the custody of the sheriff.”

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