Brian Porter
Appearances
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
The detectives that put their life's work and their life's blood into this, this is very, very serious business. It's not a TV show or a movie. My job is to protect the community and protect the memory of that victim who cannot speak for herself. And that means I got to put everything I got into it.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
I'm Brian Porter. I'm the Commonwealth's attorney for the city of Alexandria, Virginia.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
The other thing that's really important about the video is that CanCam is dressed in his security garb. So for all intents and purposes, he's dressed like a law enforcement officer. He has the pants on that many law enforcement officers wear nowadays. He has boots on. He has an external bullet-resistant vest and a carrier. He even had a fake badge attached to that.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
And then, most importantly for our purposes, at all times during this video, he is wearing a full-fledged gun belt that has a firearm in a holster on his right hip.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
There's a lot of yelling back and forth. He's getting very incensed with her. At one point, he is so angry that he drops to the floor and starts doing push-ups as though he's trying to work off some anger, vent his anger by doing physical exercise. And he's yelling at her during this timeframe.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
He finally says something to the effect to her, quote, you're pissing me off. And at that point, you can see him get up from the push-up stance and start moving toward her with his hand extended for the cell phone. And at the moment he does that, the phone goes blank.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
Watching the entirety of that video, although we did not actually capture him shooting her on the video, it was very evident from my perspective that what we did capture were the very seconds right before her death.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
And in that video, again, it's just Samaya taking the video with her cell phone, and it's CanCam, the suspect, on the phone. And they are outside of her apartment building.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
She's obviously very upset. He gets very angry. He's yelling back at her with slurred speech. But the really important part and the very scary part, unfortunately, is that at some point he sits down on the curb, looks at her, and then unexpectedly pulls up his shirt and removes a firearm from his waistband.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
And then he begins to point the firearm at her while she's videotaping him from just feet away. And he actually has to take his other hand and grab his right hand in which the firearm is located and kind of force down his hand so that the gun is not leveled at her. And he finally kind of puts it back in his waistband.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
Then I graduated from law school and immediately transferred over from being a police officer to being an assistant Commonwealth's attorney doing traffic cases. And I've been a prosecutor ever since. This is my 24th year as a prosecutor. And I have done basically every kind of case you could imagine as a prosecutor, working my way up through the ranks.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
It was very solid evidence. However, I was not convinced that the video alone was enough to charge him with murder. I felt very strongly that additional investigation needed to be conducted.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
What it did seem as though he was, A, a heavy drinker, as I've already noted, and B, kind of a fly-by-night guy who had his hands in several types of jobs. I think he at some point had tried to be a music producer and obviously the security business, but was not particularly successful at any of them.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
They went out to his apartment. They knocked on the door. They asked him if he would consent to come down to headquarters for an interview. He readily agreed, although he seemed a bit nervous. He explained that he had been drinking the night before and wasn't feeling 100%. But they put him into a police car, not handcuffed.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
They were taping the entire encounter to make it very clear that this was a voluntary and consensual situation and that it was not a custodial interrogation. And they drove him to headquarters, in which they interviewed him at length on video and tried to get his side of events.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
What he did not know, and which is always one of the wonderful things from a law enforcement perspective, is that we had this video from the night of her death, from the night that we suspected he murdered Samaya, and therefore we knew a lot about their interactions before the interview even started. And then the interview started, he very quickly began to lie.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
When law enforcement conducts an interview like this, the way I ask them to do it and the way they're trained to do it is to just get his side of the story first. Let him talk as long as he wants. If he's willing to talk, let him talk. If he's lying, let him go all the way through the lie. In other words, if his very first statement is an obvious lie, don't interrupt him and say you're lying.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
I ended up kind of focusing on gang offenses, firearms offenses, complex drug distribution cases, and then homicides.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
We can do that later on, right? Once he's said his entire story, if it's all a lie, that can be useful for us at trial, even if he never confesses to the actual crime.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
For instance, relatively minor, he admitted that he had been with her that night, that they had worked a security detail together, and that he drove her back to her apartment building. But he indicated that he was driving a Ford SUV. Well, the video very clearly showed that he was driving an old Ford Crown Victoria, the kind that many police cruisers look like. So that was a lie.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
He also indicated that he and Samaya had not been arguing that evening at all, that it was a totally fine evening and he didn't recall any argument whatsoever. We had video in which they were engaged in a very heated argument.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
He also lied about the clothing that Samaya was wearing when he left her apartment, which was important because in reality, the clothing that she had on was the same clothing that we could see in the video and also the same clothing that she was wearing when her body was discovered.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
He definitely had the personality that he thought he could talk his way out of anything. He admitted that he was with her the night before. He admitted that he went into her apartment. But the things that would really be important to the murder, he lied about.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
Because he and Samaya had both worked a security detail, they were both armed. He actually would provide her with a firearm and she would wear a gun belt. And he insisted that she had his Glock the entire evening.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
But on the cell phone video that we had, and of course, which he did not know that we had, we could clearly see that his Glock was on his person, in his external holster, on his gun belt, at all times relevant to this argument he was having with Samaya.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
His opinion of his own intellect, I think, was that he was smarter than everybody. He had concocted a story that he thought would cover him, but he did not understand that electronic evidence would be his downfall.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
What he did not know is that he was not smarter than everyone else, that we had the evidence to prove that he was lying, and that the more he spoke, actually, the worse it was getting for him.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
When we got to the end of the interview, he had lied and lied and lied, but he had not confessed to the offense. He never confessed during that interview to killing her, but he did admit a great deal of information that was extremely vital to the investigation and was also very, very quickly disprovable.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
And sometimes, as a prosecutor, having somebody tell a great, complicated, detailed set of lies is almost as good as having them confess to the crime itself.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
There's this age-old debate that I'm sure you've had in your career in which the detectives want to make the arrest because they realize this guy did it, and they're afraid that if they let him stay out on the street, he'll either flee or, alternatively, perhaps they'll hurt somebody else.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
The police very strongly want to make this arrest, but as a prosecutor, I was convinced that he had done the offense, but I also have to worry about whether or not I can get past a preliminary hearing and whether or not I can get past a motion to strike at trial and whether or not a jury could unanimously final the evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that he committed the crime because we're not doing the victim's memory or her family or the community any favors if we prematurely charge a case and then have to drop it or a not guilty verdict is returned.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
And in this case, I inherently trusted the detectives. I inherently trusted the sergeant. He gave me his word that the case would get better. So in the end, I made the decision to agree with them. And we did arrest him for murder that day by warrant. And after that, he was held in the jail, which led to the next big break in the case.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
When he's in jail, he has access to a phone system, but he does not have the regular privacy protections that a normal citizen would have because he's incarcerated in a jail and all inmates are told that their phone calls may be monitored in real time or recorded for later monitoring because they could pose a security threat to the facility.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
In this case, he called his wife, but he tried to conceal what he was talking about in two ways. One was he used an arcane language from his home country. It's called Twi, T-W-I, that very few people speak in the United States. And the second thing is he tried to use veil language using that language.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
So originally, we could not understand what he was saying to his wife, but we had help from our federal partners at the FBI who did have translators who could speak to me. We already knew that he spoke it, and so we very quickly asked them to translate for us.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
Obviously, everyone was waiting with bated breath to get that translation because he's talking about relatively benign things with his wife in English. Then all of a sudden, they switch. And listen, in any language, you can kind of tell the conspiratorial tone of voice, right?
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
And what we learned was that he was calling his wife and asking his wife to call a friend to have that friend come to the apartment and pick up a package.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
She smelled a strong odor coming from Samaya's room. So she made entry and she discovered that Samaya was dead.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
The wife told CanCam on the phone that she would do as he asked, and she immediately contacted a friend that both she and CanCam knew personally and told him that she needed him to come to the apartment to pick up a package.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
The twist is that neither the wife nor CanCam knew that the person they contacted to pick up the package was actually a police informant and had been providing information to the Alexandria Police Department for a significant period of time.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
And so when that person, that man, received the text message from the wife asking him to come pick up this package from her residence, he knew that CanCam had been arrested for homicide. He immediately called the detective who handled him and said, hey, look, CanCam's wife just asked me to come pick up a package. What should I do about that?
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
Not surprisingly, the police began to salivate at the prospect that perhaps the package contained very, very important evidence.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
The police were able to put a microphone on the informant who was driving his personal vehicle. The police were able to set up surveillance vehicles around the agreed upon location for the exchange of the package. So we had detectives in real time watching what was occurring.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
She handed it to him through the driver's side window. The informant took the package, drove around the corner and met with the police detectives, immediately handed over the package. They looked inside of the package and were absolutely stunned and astonished at what they saw inside.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
That vest had her blood all over it once DNA was used to confirm the donor of the blood. That, of course, implies that the vest was being worn in very close proximity to her when she was shot because her blood spatter was on the vest.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
They also found a cartridge case, a spent cartridge case. And that spent cartridge case later was determined to have been fired from the Glock firearm that was also inside of the bag.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
So you've got the victim's wallet, you've got the murder weapon, you've got the cartridge case that was used to shoot the round that killed her, and then you've got her blood on the very security vest that he was wearing.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
And we could, of course, establish that he was wearing that vest and carrying that firearm because they were very clearly visible on the video that we had obtained from the victim's phone.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
I can tell you from having done this job for a long time, going to trial can be a very complicated and difficult process. And even if the evidence is overwhelming, you're never sure of what's going to happen. They call them trials for a reason. They're trials. They're not preordained. Evidence that you think is going to be admitted sometimes is not allowed by the judge.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
Witnesses that you think are going to testify sometimes fail to appear and cannot be located. Even if a witness shows up, things don't go the way you expect them to go at trial.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
And in the end, of course, the system is that we have to convince 12 lay people who do not do what I do for a living and do not do what the police do for a living that this person is guilty of murder unanimously beyond a reasonable doubt. While I've always been willing to try cases, you can't be cavalier or foolhardy about that.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
And if somebody is willing to take accountability and accept responsibility for what they've done, you've got to at least consider it.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
They got to the bedroom and they saw Samaya dead. A lot of blood. The blood had coagulated and was not fresh, which led them to believe that she had been dead for some time and her body was cold to the touch.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
But the fact that he lied and lied so much in so many complicated ways that were so easily disproved, coupled with all of the other evidence, made this a very strong case for trial. But not strong enough to convince him to plead guilty. He still wanted to go to trial and testify in his own defense.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
Obviously, they're being outed as an informant for the police. They have to be identified by name. We have an absolute constitutional duty to give to the defense anything that they've received in compensation for the information they've provided to the police over the years. And then we actually have to have them come into court and take the stand.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
An added problem there when you're calling an informant to the stand is the fact that they are involved in criminal activity, which makes them useful as an informant, can make them a difficult witness, right? They usually have a criminal record. They might be suspicious of courtroom proceedings. They might come in not dressed for a courtroom proceeding.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
They might come off as somewhat suspicious to the jury and therefore perhaps not believable.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
But the problem or the issue is that when I'm asking the jury to believe someone who has received money in exchange for information, who has felony criminal convictions on their record, and who perhaps does not present well, is we have to corroborate what they're saying so that it's not just their credibility that has to be tested by the jury.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
So in the end, even though the informant had a significant amount of warts on him as a witness, none of it mattered. But there was no doubt that he was telling the truth because we had police witnesses, video and audio, as well as cell phone communications that completely corroborated that everything he was telling the jury was absolutely accurate.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
They weren't sure what had occurred, but it looked to be consistent with a gunshot wound, and that was pretty quickly confirmed that she had suffered a gunshot wound inside of her mouth, as though the gun had been placed inside of her mouth.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
We would be able to prove that he cleaned up the crime scene in part because of another small video that was located on the phone. And that video was time and date stamped after the time of what we had surmised was Samaya's death.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
It's almost though he made a mistake. You know how you might be trying to do a FaceTime call or take a selfie and you've got the camera lens going the wrong direction? It's him kind of looking at the phone from above while he's in the room, time date stamped, after the time of her death that we could establish circumstantially.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
And so that was a very big piece of evidence to help establish that he cleaned up the crime scene.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
I'm not sure what the defense attorneys counseled him because they're not allowed to tell me. It's privileged. I suspect they knew that he was walking into a very dangerous situation by taking the stand and probably counseled him not to. But CanCam, as I pointed out earlier, was the kind of guy that thought he was smarter than everyone and could explain everything away.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
And so unfortunately for him, he decided to take the stand. He testified and gave a really ridiculous story.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
What he said was, they did get into an argument, he had been drinking, that on the video in which we could see him doing the pushups and then angrily approaching Samaya, and then the video goes black, he indicated that once the video went black, he calmly grabbed her phone, placed it on the bed, calmed her down,
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
took off his gun belt, took the gun, the Glock out of the holster and left it on a nearby nightstand. And then because they had had a heated argument, he went into the bathroom, which was inside of the bedroom with a door, closed the door. And then at some point, because he had consumed too much alcohol, he went to sleep.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
He went outside of the bathroom, saw her dead. He assumed somebody had climbed up the side of the building, come into her apartment, come into her bedroom, used his gun to kill her, and then fled.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
So he decided to clean up the crime scene, collect all of the evidence, and then leave her body, I guess, to decompose so that her friends or loved ones could find her.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
It was pretty obviously to everyone, I think, that he was lying. And then I began to get really excited about the prospects across examining him. It's rare where a defendant gets on the stand in a murder case. It's rarer still where you're really prepared because he had given a very detailed statement to the police.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
And it's even better when you know you've got him lying over and over again and can prove it to the jury's satisfactions.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
All that I am focused on is honoring the memory of the victim, doing my best to honor her memory and to understand that she was loved and that people cared about her. The detectives have put their life's work and their life's blood into this. This is very, very serious business. It's not a TV show or a movie. And so I go into it very somber and very solemn and realize I've got a job to do.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
Suicide could quickly be ruled out because there was no firearm. And obviously if you're alone and shoot yourself, when the police get there, both the cartridge case that was used to kill you and also the firearm itself should be there lying right next to your body.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
And my job is to protect the community and protect the memory of that victim who cannot speak for herself. And that means I got to put everything I got into it.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
It reminds me of the famous line Mike Tyson used to say, everyone has a plan until they get punched into the face. And I punched him in the face with a couple of lies. He argued with me. I was going through the police interview. I asked him if anything in there was true. I remember him saying something along the lines of, not all of it was lies.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
And I said something along the lines of, yes, I agree with you, sir. You did give your correct name and address. At least that part was true. And from that point on, it was just a mirage of blows in which he had to concede, for the most part, that he had lied to the police and that even what he had said on direct wasn't exactly correct.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
I had the video in which he had pointed a gun at her a month before in broad daylight and basically made it very clear in a drunken stupor that he was within seconds of killing her. I started playing it for the jury while I was cross-examining him and I would stop it. And we got to the point where he had the gun pointed at her and I just kind of froze the frame.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
He looked at me very, very angry. I think he knew he was kind of caught at that point. And after a little bit of back and forth between me and him, he said it was a joke.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
That's about as close to a Perry Mason moment as I've ever had inside of a courtroom, leaving them with that still frame of him pointing a gun at her and his explanation to the jury being that he was joking. That just left the jury, I think, with an unmistakable impression of the human being they were dealing with that would come into court and tell them that kind of nonsense.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
And they quickly made short work of it and found him guilty.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
I think he basically was manipulating her using emotional abuse and emotional levels of lovers to remain in the relationship. And she did have fear for her safety, which is why she was recording these videos.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
I don't think she suspected that he would actually kill her, but I think she knew she was dealing with a very volatile personality and that his personality became even more volatile when he was consuming large amounts of alcohol.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
I was able pretty clearly to find that she was an exceptionally smart person. Her friends confirmed this and there were many videos on her phone that just had her in her everyday life. I found that she was a very warm and loving person. I found that she cared very deeply about her family at home and actually sent them money whenever she could.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
There were no signs of forced entry. The apartment was not on the ground floor. It would be extremely difficult for someone to climb up the side of the building. They'd almost have to be Spider-Man, for instance, to even have a chance of getting in. And there was no sign of forced entry to any of the windows.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
I don't know how she met Daniel Cancam, but she did not know the danger that had been set in motion from that fateful meeting. If she had not met him, there's no doubt she'd be alive right now. And that's really one of the very sad things about my job is I don't get involved until something really terrible has happened. And unfortunately, I tell the families this. I'm just a human being.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
I can't make things right. But the one thing that I can do is give every ounce that I have into trying to relive the situation, feel the situation, and then be dedicated along with the really professional law enforcement detectives who investigated this matter and trying to bring a modicum of justice and solace to the community, to the victim's family and friends.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
But I think we were able to accomplish that in this case. And we got a guy off the street who is probably primed to do this to someone else in the future if he was not held accountable.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
So once a gunshot wound to the mouth was confirmed, once no signs of forced entry were discovered, And once it was very clear that there was no firearm or spent cartridge case in the room, it very quickly became a homicide investigation.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
Samaya hailed from Egypt. She was bilingual. She had been in the United States for some period of time. I think she had gotten into the States maybe five or six years before her death.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
She was a hard worker. She worked at the airport. She had maintained several jobs, trying to make sure that she had enough money to pay rent.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
So the autopsy, of course, in these situations is done as close as possible. From the outside, the autopsy confirmed that there was a significant amount of blood in the mouth and nose area and also dripping from the area of the back of her head.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
The medical examiner who conducted the autopsy also confirmed that rigor mortis had set in, which helped us kind of narrow down the timeframe as being a little bit longer than we normally see when a body is located.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
There was no stippling on the exterior of her mouth, meaning that the firearm was deep inside the victim's mouth when it was fired. Also, there were injuries to her front teeth, which were consistent with the gun being forcibly pushed into her mouth.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
The roommate and Samaya were friends. They had known each other for a while. They were both relatively recent immigrants to the United States, but they weren't particularly close. It was more a financial situation to share the rent.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
They maintained different schedules, a different group of friends. But the one thing that was really important at the outset was that the roommate was able to provide the name of Samaya's boyfriend, Daniel Cancam.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
She explained that they had a tempestuous relationship in which she frequently heard arguing either on the telephone or in Samaya's bedroom.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
She told us that Daniel was actually married and was maintaining an affair with Samaya and that Samaya was aware that he was married, that he kept promising that he was going to leave his wife but never had, and that caused tension in the relationship.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
She was somewhat reliant on Daniel Cancam for financial support. He occasionally gave her money, access to cars, which she did not own. And I think he used that power dynamic to his advantage in keeping some control over her. And then the final thing I would point out is that Cancam was a very heavy drinker, was frequently drunk. Samaya, as a devout Muslim, did not consume alcohol at all.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
Daniel was the owner of a small private security business that Samaya sometimes moonlighted for, and that this business would provide security at dive bars and music situations in the Northern Virginia area. This meant that Daniel CanCam had access to and frequently wore a firearm on his hip and a gun belt similar to what law enforcement wears.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
We did not have any video from the actual apartment building, but there was a brief video that captured his vehicle. The night before the murder, Daniel and Samaya had been working together at a dive bar right outside of the city doing security, and they drove back to Samaya's apartment in a van. former law enforcement vehicle that Daniel had purchased to be part of his security company.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
So we had video of the vehicle. We could not really see the people in it. And it was not from inside of the apartment complex, but it did confirm that his car was in the parking lot in the early morning hours right around the time of the murder.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
Samaya's cell phone was located at the scene next to her body. So the cell phone was recovered and that ended up becoming a very integral part of the investigation because of the evidence that was contained upon it.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
I think most lay people probably assume that it's a very simple and easy affair for law enforcement to obtain all of the contents of a cell phone. But actually, it's a two-step process, both of which can be somewhat difficult. The first, of course, is you have to obtain legal process.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
In this case, because we had probable cause to believe a homicide occurred, getting a search warrant for the phone was relatively easy. But the next is you have to obtain access.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
But finally, through the hard work of our electronic surveillance unit, we were able to grab access to her phone, and the phone in particular contained several items of interest.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
Those messages revealed a very tempestuous and argumentative situation in which they were frequently bickering about the way he treated Samaya and about his refusal to leave his wife for her.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
We were able to get into the phone and the electronic guys had been able to download the videos and extract them so that we could view them. Very quickly, Daniel Cancam became the primary suspect.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
It clearly shows Samaya wearing the same clothes in which she was found when her body was located. And it also was date and time stamped at almost the exact time we believe she was killed.
Anatomy of Murder
The Sting (Somaya Hussein Ahmed)
The video shows a very sober Samaya and a very drunk Daniel Can-Can involved in a dispute about him leaving his wife and about the way he treats Samaya.