On October 24, two Saudi Arabian sisters, Rotana Farea, 22, and Tala Farea, 16, 16, who were living in Fairfax, Virginia, were found dead in the Hudson River with their waists and ankles bound together with duct tape. There were no signs of trauma and their cause of death remains a mystery--but it’s now been reported that the two sisters likely entered the water alive.
NBC News reports that suicide is still the leading theory according to law enforcement and that an initial theory that the two women had jumped from the bridge into the river has been ruled out due to a lack of bodily trauma and the fact that nobody witnessed anyone jump from the bridge.
The Farea sisters were reported missing on September 12 and were last heard from on August 24. Their mother reportedly received a call from the Saudi Arabian Embassy the day before their bodies were discovered, saying that her daughters had applied for political asylum and asking the family to leave the country. The sisters had also been reported missing last year in December according to CBS News, and when police located them they asked for protection and they were put in a shelter.
As of right now there is little information available on the two sisters. Neither sister was active on social media or cellphones. Rotana reportedly attended George Mason University but left in the spring.
“We are out to get justice for those two girls and to find out exactly what happened what led them to be recovered in the water,” NYPD Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea said in a briefing this week reported by CBS.
DISCUSSION
This is ambiguous enough to gloss over an important detail. Their were not individually bound, the two of them were, bodily, bound together with duct tape, facing each other, with the duct tape wrapped around their ankles and waists.
You wouldn’t need to toss them from a significant height; that arrangement alone would make it next to impossible for them to swim for very long. This idea that it might have been a suicide pact isn’t really plausible. They’d have just jumped off a bridge together, not tied themselves up to slowly drown.