My mother left the house that morning for her daily walk.
She did this every day. She was in her eighties and she moved through the world with the kind of quiet dignity that came from a life well-lived and deeply loved. She was careful. She was healthy. She had plans. She had a trip planned to come visit me and my family just days later. She had just had the house freshly painted, new appliances brought in, and had worked for months to make it perfect for later, when I would spend more time in Morocco. She wanted it ready for me. She wanted it to feel like home.
Mom never came back from that walk.
On August 6, 2018, Pierrette M’Jid, my mother, was struck and killed by a driver in a large SUV while on her morning walk along the Corniche in Casablanca. Every morning, she would walk from the house to that avenue along the ocean, walk alongside it, breathe the air, and then make her way back. It was her ritual. It was her peace. That morning, she never made it home.
By all accounts, the killer drove straight toward her. He did not brake. He did not swerve. There were no brake marks on the road. He struck her head on, then tried to flee the scene. He was caught only because, as he fled, he struck another car and got stuck. The sentence he received was so light, so incongruously mild for a life taken, that it shocked all those who heard it. I, her only daughter, was devastated beyond words.
My mother was killed at approximately 6:30 that morning. Elkabous told me the driver had been drunk and drugged, and that he had no license. Though I no longer believe anything that individual says. What I do know is what the facts established: no attempt to brake, no skid marks, and an attempt to flee the scene.
And I know something else now. Since this blog was published, multiple people have contacted me separately, executives, physicians, journalists, family friends, each telling me, independently, that they believed Elkabous was involved in my mother’s death. Each of them indicated that this belief was widely shared among many in Casablanca. The people reaching out to me did not know each other. They did not coordinate. They each came forward from different places with the same conclusion.
I am not a prosecutor, but I am placing facts in their sequence. I am reporting what I was told and by whom. Others may draw their own conclusions. I have drawn mine.
And what followed tells you everything you need to know about the individual who had been circling my family for years. It was a plan already in motion.
Soufiane Elkabous already in her bedroom, already emptying her safe.
I took the next flight out of New York and landed in Casablanca the very next morning, hours before her funeral, less than twenty-four hours after my mother was killed.
And I discovered that in that same window of time, before I had even landed, before she had even been buried, Elkabous the ungrateful, Elkabous the thief, had already entered her private bedroom, opened her personal safe, and emptied it entirely. The safe she had given me the combination to during her last visit to the United States. The safe where she had placed the inheritance documents, the copy of the clear house title, her will, valuables she intended for me, and the pieces that had survived the prior theft, fragments of a life she had built across sixty years with my father, and plans for life after her departure.
Gone. All of it. Stolen before she was buried.
What kind of animal does that? What cold calculation, what darkness precedes such an act?
In reality, that act did not happen in a vacuum. And nothing about it was spontaneous.
In the months before she died, there had already been a warning, one I described in my previous post, that my mother had shared with her sister, my aunt Colette, and with me, and that had left her genuinely afraid. No one ever answered for what happened to that first safe stolen from a wall. No one was ever asked to.
Then, she did not believe the version of events pushed by Elkabous, that the maid had done it. She did not for a single moment. But the version she believed instead was far more frightening.
My mother expressed fear in the months before her death. Privately, she named a source for that fear. She was killed a few short months later. And the person she feared walked into her bedroom within hours of her death and took everything she had tried to protect for me. Without delay. Without hesitation. As if he had been waiting. Or knew it was coming.
What I also know is this: the driver who killed her faced justice, however inadequate the outcome.
On the other hand, the individual whose criminal behavior was known long before this series of events, whose role in my mother’s death is at the very least an open question, who violated my family’s home on the day my mother was killed, who emptied her safe before she was buried, who plundered her bank accounts after her death, who forged documents in her name after she was gone, who occupies the home she left to me to this day, who stripped it of everything it contained, who erased her name and my father’s name from every registry he could reach, that individual never had to answer for his actions. No consequences. No investigation. No justice. Nothing at all.
He walks freely. He sits behind my father’s desk. He illegally uses my father’s name. He occupies my parents’ home. He has admitted to these crimes, one by one, without remorse, with contempt, with the ease of someone who believes that justice will never reach him.
My mother was not a footnote. She was not collateral damage in someone else’s story. She was Pierrette M’Jid. She was the wife of my father, Mohamed M’Jid, for sixty years, a man who devoted his entire life to Morocco. She was my mother and that of my only and younger brother, Karim, who left us too soon. She loved her life in Casablanca. She loved our home there. She loved her garden. She loved her morning walks along the Corniche. She called me every day. She shared the news with me. She always inquired about my family and followed everything closely. She missed my father every single day and spoke of him with the same love in her eighties as she had at twenty-two, when she met him.
She did not deserve what happened to her. And, she did not deserve to have her death followed by the desecration of everything she had built and protected.
And this will not be forgotten.
The documentation is complete. The facts are on record. The pattern is established. What remains now is justice, and the full and unflinching exposure of everything that was done.
To those who know the truth and have chosen to speak up, to share it, and to act in whatever way they could: thank you. Your courage matters more than you know.
To those in positions to act, who were entrusted to act, who committed to act, and who did nothing: history will record your inaction. Your silence favors the criminal. Everyone knows that much.
But this story will not stay contained to these pages. Its exposure will reach far beyond where it stands today. The injustice demands to be heard, everywhere. And we will not stop telling it.
For Mom.