A young woman from Orlando, Florida found out that her younger sister and her long-distance boyfriend, with whom she had been in a relationship with for about five years, were flirting behind her back, while they were playing an online video game together. They were messaging through a game called Valorant via the game’s messaging feature.
In a jealous rage, Fatiha Marzan, 21, stabbed her sister, Sayma, 20, to death for flirting with her boyfriend. She had been thinking about killing her for weeks.
Marzan was arrested and charged with first-degree murder.
The young woman killed her sister while she was sleeping, in the bed they both shared in their family home in Orlando, in the middle of the night/early morning on September 26.
She told Orange County sheriffs that she had been thinking about killing her sister for over two weeks and purchased a dagger knife set when she saw the messages between her sister and her boyfriend. The straw that broke the camel’s back was when she saw that her boyfriend had told her sister that he loved her.
She had contemplated killing herself instead, but she was talked out of it by another sister.
On that fateful morning, she removed the knives from their hiding place after her family had gone to sleep. She stabbed Sayma three times in the heart while she was sleeping.
It wasn’t until 7:30 pm that night that Orange County police received a 911 call about a death in Azalea Park, Orlando. Fatiha admitted to 911 operators that Sayma was dead and she had stabbed her.
The young woman was pronounced dead when the paramedics arrived at the crime scene.
The police say that the murder was premeditated and the assailant was in sound mind when she committed the crime.
Witnesses who knew Fatiha said that she felt angered and betrayed by her sister’s relationship with her boyfriend.
Fatiha was arrested and is detained at the Orange County jail without bond.
Over the past ten years, domestic violence murders in Florida have increased to around 200 per year. Records show that from the late 1990s, about a quarter of homicide victims reported yearly were either killed by their family members or people they lived with. Last year, Orange County recorded 117 murders, a slight decrease from 138 in 2020.
In August 2022, a man from Florida’s Lake District murdered his wife and three children and then himself. In April 2020, a physical therapist was found guilty of killing his wife, three children, and the family dog in their home in Central Florida.