Killer of 5 Members of His Family Given Life in Prison

A judge following a jury’s recommendation formally sentenced Toufic Naddi to life in prison without the possibility of parole Monday for killing five family members.

Naddi, 49, received the sentence from San Diego Superior Court Judge Raymond Edwards Jr. for the June 1, 1985, shootings of his wife, her parents and two other relatives in the family’s El Cajon home.

Naddi was convicted of five first-degree murders on June 8, 1988, at his first trial, but the issue of his sanity at the time of the slayings was not resolved until his fourth sanity trial this summer.

The fourth sanity jury found that Naddi was sane when he shot the victims repeatedly in the head, and it later rejected the death penalty in favor of life imprisonment.

As a precaution, Deputy Dist. Atty. Bob Boles asked Edwards to sentence Naddi consecutively to a 135 years to life term in the event an appeals court overturns the special-circumstances findings that Naddi committed multiple murders.

Edwards did sentence Naddi to five consecutive terms of 27 years to life, or 135 years.

Naddi has always admitted that he killed the victims, but insisted that he did it because his father-in-law was having sex with Naddi’s wife.

Naddi’s victims were Aida Naddi, 26; her father, Habib Sabbagh, 73; her mother, Lillian Sabbagh, 58; her cousin Miuchael Sabbagh, 38, and her brother-in-law Osama Mashini, 38.

The Sabbagh family was well known in Jordan, and Mashini was an actor-comedian in that country and was visiting the Sabbagh residence at the time.