Father of Slain Woman Recalls Troubled Past : Crime: Her death did not surprise her family. She had been arrested before on drug and prostitution charges.

The father of a North Hollywood woman whose strangled body was found beside an isolated road north of Ojai said Thursday that his daughter recently wrote home about someone harassing her and said she had planned to seek a restraining order.

But Abdel Chehade, 53, of Riverside County said he could shed little more light on the recent death, or life, of his 26-year-old daughter, Najat.

He said he had last seen his daughter, the second of four children, about three years ago when she refused to abide by his plan to give up old friends and drugs.

News of her death did not shock him, he said. “In a way I was surprised, but in a way I expected the telephone call sooner or later,” Chehade said.

Chehade learned of his daughter’s death Wednesday after the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department identified her through fingerprints registered with the Department of Justice.

Najat Chehade’s body was discovered about 10:40 a.m. Monday on the side of California 33 by a Sheriff’s Department employee who was transporting inmates to the Rose Valley Work Camp, authorities said.

Chehade had been strangled with a cord 16 to 17 hours earlier, Sheriff’s Lt. Joe Harwell said. An autopsy revealed no signs of sexual assault, authorities said.

While it is impossible to tell where the woman was killed, there was no sign of struggle where the body was found, Harwell said. It appears that her body was dumped off the side of the road after dark Sunday night, and whoever dumped it probably intended it to roll farther down the embankment, Harwell said.

Further investigation has been stalled because authorities have been unable to track down the woman’s friends, Sheriff’s Sgt. Tom Odle said. They believe that she lived in North Hollywood and had a post office box in Hollywood.

Authorities know that she had left a job at a bank in Encino in August after she was accused of stealing money. She also had been arrested over prostitution and narcotics violations, Odle said.

Najat Chehade left home for the first time at 15, her father said during a telephone interview. She came back about four months later, beginning a sequence of departures and returns that would last until her father persuaded her to relocate to Arizona about four years ago, he said.

Chehade said he believed that the new environment would give her a chance to get away from her friends in Los Angeles and straighten out her life. For a while, he said, the plan seemed to be working.

But she returned two months later to the Los Angeles area. It was the last time he saw her.

Najat Chehade spoke with her mother a few times and wrote home a couple of times in the next several years, he said.

In the last letter, which arrived about three weeks ago, she said someone had been bothering her and she would try to get a restraining order. She never asked her family for help, her father said.

She gave her parents no home address and no telephone number. She told them that she was living in the San Fernando Valley and gave them the number of her post office box.

“All she was after was freedom, and she wanted to be by herself,” Abdel Chehade said.