Real-Life CSI: When One Identical Twin Is Accused of Killing the Other
Real-Life CSI: When One Identical Twin Is Accused of Killing the Other
Wael Ali was still awake, cramming for exams in the small house that served as his sanctuary from the past.
It had been four years since Wael’s identical twin brother, Wasel, was found dead in a wooded area near the Mall in Columbia. To escape constant reminders of the crime, Ali had moved 700 miles away, to Marietta, Ga., where he had enrolled in college and was finally rebuilding his life.
On Sept. 15, 2011, the 23-year-old was staring at his laptop in the pre-dawn darkness when the phone rang. Ali didn’t answer. But when he looked up, he says, he sensed movement outside.
At the back of the house, he heard police radios crackling. A fugitive squad was approaching. The officers had a warrant for his arrest.
From the Cobb County jail, Ali called his family back in Maryland.
“I’ve been arrested for first-degree murder,” Ali recalls telling his father, Gihad.
His father was incredulous. “Who?” he asked. “Who did you kill?”
They said I killed Wasel, he replied.
His father, a tough-minded former colonel in the Sudanese army, sobbed as the anguish of Wasel’s death was rekindled and then immediately eclipsed by the suggestion that he had been killed by his mirror image.
The twins had always been inseparable. Growing up, they’d slept in the same bed, gotten sick at the same time, recited the same prayers at the family’s mosque, enlisted in the Army on the same day. Their names were distinguished from each other by a single letter. Their faces, their close-cropped hair, their skinny athletic bodies — even their DNA — were interchangeable.
Their father didn’t believe “for one fraction of a second,” he says, that Wael had killed Wasel.
Police and prosecutors didn’t believe anything else.