Evidence Tying Doctor to Son’s Death Revealed

The prosecutor in charge of the grisly case of a Hacienda Heights physician accused of strangling and dismembering his 11-year-old son unveiled Friday key portions of the circumstantial evidence linking the victim’s father to the crime.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Richard D. Burns III said the evidence includes a school diary written by the dead boy, Raheel Parwez, saying he was being mistreated by his father, Dr. Khalid Parwez, and preferred to live with his mother, who was seeking to regain custody of the boy and his younger brother.

Burns also said Parwez, an obstetrician and gynecologist at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in West Los Angeles, has been linked to the payment of two large sums of money totaling $5,500 to a brother, Sattar Ahmad, who disappeared the day the murder was discovered and is still being sought as another prime suspect in the case.

The prosecutor also challenged the doctor’s alibi that he was on a 24-hour shift at the hospital starting about the time of his son’s disappearance, saying that investigators have learned there was a five-hour gap during Parwez’s duty schedule when he could have slipped away unnoticed.

Check Cashed

According to Burns and other sources close to the prosecution, Ahmad, who had been living with Parwez at his home in Hacienda Heights, cashed a check for $2,500 from Khalid Parwez at Century Federal Savings in Puente Hills on Nov. 13 and opened a $500 checking account on that date. The same day, he rented a nearby apartment where the murder allegedly took place.

Raheel Parwez disappeared the morning of Nov. 16 after a neighbor dropped him at Mesa Robles Junior High School where he was then seen getting into a blue car similar to one driven by Ahmad.

Sources close to the case disclosed for the first time Friday that the murder victim was seen again later that day at 9:25 a.m. at an Alpha Beta market where he was apparently dropped off long enough to buy two small toy airplanes--one white and one blue--for $1.29 each.

The two airplanes, according to one source, were found with the boy’s bloody clothing in one of the plastic bags dumped in the trash bin at the Hacienda Pines Apartments, where a maintenance worker discovered the boy’s remains the morning of Nov. 17 shortly before a regularly scheduled garbage pickup.

Burns said Friday that the boy, whose flesh had been stripped from the bone, was cut into more than 200 pieces. He said the weapons apparently used for the mutilation included a hatchet, an ax, a sledgehammer and “cutting instruments at least as sharp as a scalpel.”

Arraignment Delayed

Parwez, who is being held without bail at the Los Angeles County Jail, appeared in Pomona Municipal Court on Friday for an arraignment that was postponed until Wednesday while Judge Robert A. Dukes studies defense motions challenging the prosecution’s intention to treat the murder case as one with “special circumstances” justifying the death penalty.

Parwez, who immigrated to the United States from Pakistan in the early 1970s, was involved in a bitter divorce case with his first wife, Amtul, and had been awarded custody of their two children, Raheel and Nabeel, 7, last year. Amtul Parwez, however, was trying to win custody on grounds that she had been unfairly portrayed by the doctor as a woman with dangerous religious hallucinations.

In the increasingly bitter aftermath of Raheel’s murder, the victim’s parents escalated their charges against each other through attorneys, each claiming the other to be prone to violence and likely to face defeat in the renewed custody fight that was scheduled to begin Nov. 18, the day after the murder was discovered.

“There is no evidence to connect the former wife to this crime,” Burns said in a strong defense of Amtul Parwez, who was among the spectators at her former husband’s postponed arraignment.

Allegations ‘Unfounded’

“I have looked at her so-called religious writings and seen some of the mental reports and talked to her personally,” he continued. “I have concluded the allegations of any mental problem on her part are unfounded, and she had an excellent chance of regaining custody of her children. In addition, she had an appointment with the Department of Motor Vehicles in Torrance the morning of her son’s disappearance.”

In outlining key portions of the prosecution case against Khalid Parwez, Burns challenged the doctor’s alibi that he was on duty at Kaiser Permanente from 8:30 a.m. Nov. 16, the morning of his son’s disappearance, until 8:30 a.m. Nov. 17, shortly before the body was found.

“We know he was on call at the hospital, but their practice was the doctors on duty would split up at night and use their own sleeping quarters,” he said. “In fact, one baby he allegedly delivered at 5:30 a.m. Nov. 17 was delivered by another doctor. There is no one we’ve found who saw him there from 3 a.m. to 8 a.m. the day the murder was discovered.”

Burns said that while no specific time of death has been established, there is strong evidence suggesting that the murder was committed late Nov. 16 or early Nov. 17.

“The flesh was still warm when we found the remains,” he said.

According to other sources, homicide detectives first focused on Khalid Parwez partly because of the surgical skill evident in the dismemberment of the body and partly on his reaction when told that his son was dead.

“He expressed little or no emotion before he learned of his son’s death and never asked where his son was found or what had happened to him after he was told the boy had been murdered,” one investigator said.

Burns, declining comment on the possible whereabouts of Sattar Ahmad, said one of the final connections in the decision to charge Khalid Parwez with murder came when investigators learned that just before noon on Nov. 17 the victim’s father was seen cashing a check for $3,000 at the Century Federal Savings branch where his brother, Sattar, had opened the account needed to rent the apartment where the murder allegedly was committed.

“That was about the same time the homicide investigators were arriving at the trash dumpster where they found Raheel’s body,” Burns said. “The teller noticed Sattar Ahmad waiting outside the bank. At one point, he came in and asked why it was taking so long to get the money. And that is the last we’ve heard of Sattar Ahmad.”

Attorney Leslie Abramson, representing Khalid Parwez, maintained her client’s innocence Friday, but could not be reached for response to Burns’ comments.