Kabary Salem testifies in his defense; case expected to go to jury today

A jury of seven women and five men is expected to start deliberations Friday morning, Oct. 24, in the homicide trial of 57-year-old Kabary Salem, who is accused of fatally strangling his 25-year-old daughter, Ola, in Palmyra in 2019.

Prosecutors allege that Salem killed his daughter in Palmyra sometime late on Oct. 23 or early on Oct. 24, 2019, drove her body to a secluded cul-de-sac in a park in Staten Island, New York, then dumped it in a wooded area.

Salem was originally charged in New York. Prosecutors there didn’t realize until days before trial was to start that a New York medical investigator had concluded that Ola died in Pennsylvania. They dropped the New York charges and transferred the case to Lebanon County, where new murder charges were filed.

The trial was unusual in that the case presented to the Lebanon County jury was assembled almost entirely by New York police, meaning that most prosecution witnesses were current or former New York officers who had to travel to Lebanon to testify.

Because of the interstate nature of the case, the prosecuting attorneys were from the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office, not the Lebanon County District Attorney’s office.

Read More: Trial of former Olympic boxer accused of killing daughter underway in Lebanon

Prosecution presents cadaver dog evidence

On Thursday morning, the commonwealth called its final witness, retired NYPD canine officer Greg Evert. Evert explained that his cadaver dog, Ozzie, was trained to detect odors of human remains and would signal their presence by lying down at the spot where an odor was detected.

Previously admitted prosecution GPS evidence suggested that, early on the morning of Oct. 24, Kabary Salem’s rented Toyota Camry drove from Palmyra to a cul-de-sac in the Staten Island park, about 30 feet from where Ola Salem’s body was found, then left minutes later and drove back to Palmyra. Prosecutors have implied that Ola’s body was taken to New York in the trunk.

Evert said Ozzie searched the Camry at a police facility after it was located at a New Jersey rental agency. Evert described starting at the driver’s side and walking Ozzie counterclockwise around the car. “As he was turning at the back of the car,” Evert testified, “he jumped in the trunk and laid down,” signaling the recent presence of human remains.

On cross examination by defense attorney Jay Nigrini, Evert conceded that cadaver dogs are not infallible and can give “false positives” by being subtly influenced by a desire for a reward for finding something, a desire to please their handler, and “cueing” such as a handler slowing down or fidgeting at a certain spot. Evert also admitted that Ozzie “more than likely” would have expected a reward every time he was asked to perform a search.

Nigrini had argued in pretrial hearings that cadaver dog evidence was scientifically unreliable and should not be allowed. Charles ruled that it could be used just to corroborate other evidence, but not as independent evidence of guilt.

Son testifies about family life

The commonwealth rested its case after Evert’s testimony, and Kabary Salem’s son, Omar, was the first defense witness called by Nigrini.

Omar Salem told the jury that his family lived in Brooklyn when he was born, then Staten Island, and finally Long Island, where the family still resides. His parents raised five children in a Muslim household.

It was a “boxing family,” Omar recalled, because his father had been an Olympic and professional boxer, and he followed in his father’s footsteps by becoming a pro boxer and owner of a boxing gym. “My dad never physically disciplined my sisters, but he was a little harder on us sons,” Omar recalled.

Omar told the jury that his sister Ola got married at 20 or 21 but “it was not a healthy relationship.” Ola would would move back in with the family during periods of marital strife. “She’d always come back to us,” then return to her husband.

After her marriage, Omar said Ola began exhibiting symptoms of paranoia, believing that people were following her and that her phone was spying on her. “She was always scared,” he testified. She would disappear “all the time” when her paranoia flared up, often coming back to the family home saying “somebody is looking at me.” At one point, the family put Ola in a “psych ward,” he testified.

Omar told the jury that in the last year of Ola’s life, he began to get threatening anonymous calls about Ola including death threats, with one caller telling him, “I’m going to kill your sister.”

Although there were periods where Ola would be “mentally healthy,” Omar said that his sister overall “wasn’t healthy minded,” and police were often called to fights between her and her husband.

The family obtained protection orders against Ola not so much out of fear for their safety, but “to help her get help,” Omar said. Police were called to the house frequently enough that “it impacted family relationships,” he said.

Omar said his father started investing in restaurants in 2019 and saw that as a way to help his sister by getting her away from “the bad environment in New York. … All he wanted to do was help her get away from New York and all her bad friends.”

On cross examination, Deputy Attorney General Brian Zarallo challenged the idea that the Salem family was loving and peaceful, asking Omar about an argument he and his sister engaged in via hostile text messages on Oct. 23, accusing him of being “the last person to threaten [Ola].” Omar replied that he was angry because Ola had stolen their mother’s social security card and he was trying to get it back. “I was frustrated with her,” he told the prosecutor.

Kabary Salem takes the witness stand

After his son’s testimony, Kabary Salem took the witness stand in his own defense.

Answering Nigrini’s questions with the occasional help of an Arabic interpreter, Salem told the jury that he was born in Egypt, but moved to the United States in 1996 after visiting it as a member of the Egyptian Olympic boxing team.

Limousine and security businesses that he successfully ran gave him enough money to begin investing in restaurants, Salem said, including the one he and his partners were preparing to reopen in 2019 in Palmyra.

Salem said he saw restaurants as a way to help his troubled daughter Ola get away from what he considered a bad marriage, bad environment, and bad acquaintances in New York.

At first, Salem opened a pizzeria in Trenton, New Jersey, hoping to install Ola as manager, but she told him “I want to go back to New York and see my friends.” In October 2019, he brought Ola along to Palmyra to help open the restaurant there. “I thought I would get her away from her husband, he scared me, and her bad friends,” he testified.

On the afternoon of Oct. 23, Salem said he and Ola got into an intense argument, and he asked another worker to take Ola for a drive to cool things down. They returned after a few hours, and things seemed better for the rest of the afternoon, he said.

Later that evening, Salem said he and Ola were preparing to leave the restaurant, with Ola driving his rented Camry. A worker asked them to move the Camry because it was blocking his exit, but Ola wouldn’t do so.

At that point, Salem testified, “I grabbed her shirt so she would move the car. She gets out, and I move the car.” Then, he continued, “I see her run to a black car and get in and it left.” That, he testified, was the last he saw his daughter alive.

After Salem’s testimony, Staten Island detective Michael Burke testified in rebuttal that Salem told him that he had “physically removed her from the car by grabbing her neck,” and that Salem made a grabbing motion with his left hand.

That evening, Salem testified that he was worried about his daughter to the point he couldn’t sleep. After talking to his wife, he decided “I have to look for her” and drove his rented Camry to Staten Island, thinking she likely went there.

When he arrived there, Salem said he went first to a house where he had picked Ola up once before, then to Bloomingdale Park, where he knew she had hung out. At the park cul-de-sac, Salem told the jury that he encountered three, maybe five, unidentified men, and asked them if they had seen his daughter.

At that point, Salem continued, the men attacked him and he fought them off with a Kobalt brand shovel he’d bought the day before at a Lowes store to use at the restaurant, but had put back in the Camry because he was going to return it.

Salem testified that he left the park minutes later and drove back to Palmyra, arriving there at 7:37 a.m on Oct. 24, according to prosecution GPS evidence.

Later on Oct. 24, after being contacted by Staten Island police and told his daughter had been found dead, Kabary Salem and his son Omar returned to Staten Island and met with detectives there.

Under aggressive cross examination by Zarallo, Salem admitted that during his meeting with detectives he never mentioned driving to Bloomingdale Park and back to Palmyra earlier in the day, or that he’d been attacked by men just 30 feet from where his daughter was eventually discovered.

Pointing out that Salem was given the chance to speak freely to detectives for about an hour, Zarallo asked incredulously, “You’re there with detectives to talk about your daughter’s death, and you don’t tell them that you were 30 feet from the spot where she was found hours later, or that you were attacked by men there and fought them off with a shovel? You didn’t tell the detectives ‘Hey! Those guys might be my daughter’s killers?'”

Salem responded, “They didn’t ask me.”

Trial is expected to reconvene at 8:30 Friday morning with closing arguments from the attorneys and the judge’s instructions to the jury, after which it will begin deliberating.