Police sketch of Rotana (left), 22, and Tala, 16, Farea, whose bodies were found bound with duct tape facing each other in a cross formation. Photo / AP
Police sketch of Rotana (left), 22, and Tala, 16, Farea, whose bodies were found bound with duct tape facing each other in a cross formation. Photo / AP
Everett Johnson said his former neighbour's face grew stern when he asked how she was doing during a chance encounter around the start of October in Fairfax County, Virginia. The mother from Saudi Arabia offered a surprising reply.
"I don't know where my daughters are," the woman told Johnson. "I haven't seen them in a long time."
Johnson said the mother told him that she didn't know why Rotana Farea, 22, and Tala Farea, 16, had disappeared or where they were, and that she hadn't communicated with them recently. The distraught mother asked Johnson what to do.
"I told her, 'Call the police,' " Johnson said.
The unusual encounter came roughly a month before the sisters' bodies were found on the banks of the Hudson River in New York City on October 24, police said.
The bodies, which were bound together with duct tape around the waist and ankles, had washed ashore near 68th Street and Riverside Park in Manhattan. A passerby found the bodies lying on rocks beneath a pier. They were fully clothed in black leggings and fur-trimmed jackets and showed no apparent signs of trauma. A photo from the scene shows silvery duct tape tangled up with the girls legs and wrapped around their shoes.
The mystery surrounding what befell the sisters has only deepened over the last week. New York City police said they are trying to piece together a two-month gap in the sisters' lives after they disappeared in late August, while a medical examiner is still determining the cause and manner of their deaths. CBS News reported that the examiner's office, which has declined to answer questions, has determined that the sisters were alive when they entered the water.
Police have not revealed whether they know how the sisters got to New York City, whether they believe their deaths are murder or suicide, or why they went missing in the first place. For young women in the social media age, the sisters had little obvious online presence. No photos of the sisters could be found before police released images from the family on Wednesday.
But Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea of the New York Police Department said investigators have begun "unravelling" some questions about the deaths after interviewing family members and other people in Virginia this week.
"There has been what I will call significant progress trying to get the complete picture of what ultimately led to the two young ladies' being discovered," Shea said.
The sisters were reported missing September 12 but were last heard from on August 24, the Fairfax County police said. Still unclear is why family members waited nearly three weeks to file a missing-person report, but police said neither sister was believed to be in danger at that time.
The crime scene after the two Saudi-born sisters were found duct taped together. Photo / WTVR
The sisters were previously reported missing on December 1, 2017, but were found after a day, Fairfax County police said. Authorities said the sisters were referred to county services but also said privacy rules precluded the release of additional details.
Neither parent of the Fareas responded to requests for comment. Friends have remained silent as well.
A New York City police spokeswoman declined to comment on the sisters' immigration status. The New York Post, citing unnamed police sources, reported that detectives learned that the day before the bodies were found, the mother received a call from an official at the Saudi Embassy in Washington saying the family may have to leave the United States because the sisters had applied for political asylum.
The Saudi Embassy did not respond to a request for comment, but the Saudi Consulate in New York City issued a statement saying that it had retained an attorney to "follow the case closely" and that the embassy had offered assistance to the Farea sisters' family.
New York police on Wednesday appealed to public for information about the sisters, who police said may have been staying in the New York City metro area. Shea said authorities do know some of what the sisters had been doing.
Media outlets in New York initially reported that police were investigating the case as a suicide pact, with the girls possibly leaping from the George Washington Bridge, but investigators backed off that theory because such a long fall would have produced trauma to their bodies and motorists would have been likely to see the pair on the bridge.
The Arab News, citing unnamed family members in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, reported that the family has rejected the idea that the sisters committed suicide. The Arab News said family members said Tala missed her sister and had run away from home to be with her in New York City, where Rotana was attending college.
The family members told the Arab News that relatives were concerned about Tala Farea's disappearance but called off their search after discovering that the teen was with her sister. The veracity of those reports could not be confirmed.
Johnson, the neighbour, said the younger sister lived in a Fairfax, Virginia, apartment with her mother and a brother, who was around 12, and possibly an older second brother. Johnson said he thought Rotana was living away from home at college and saw her less frequently. He said the sisters' father lived in Saudi Arabia and may have worked for the government there. He would visit periodically.
He said that the family moved out over the summer and that he had seen no obvious problems in the household.
"They were always pleasant," Johnson said.
Johnson said a succession of Saudi exchange students had lived in the apartment before the Fareas. George Mason University spokesman Michael Sandler said Rotana had attended the school but left in the spring.
"The news of her death is tragic," Sandler wrote in an email. "University officials are cooperating with police and will assist in any way we can."
Tala attended Fairfax High School for part of the 2017-2018 school year, but a spokesman for the Fairfax County Public Schools said he could offer no other details because of student privacy restrictions.
"On behalf of all members of the Fairfax High School family, we extend our deepest condolences to family, friends, and all those impacted by this event," Principal Erin Lenart wrote in a message to school families last week.
Fairfax County court records show the family may have been in financial distress. In 2016, family members were evicted from an apartment in Falls Church's Skyline Towers after failing to pay nearly $1,700 in rent, according to court records. After the family moved to the apartment in Fairfax, another management company initiated eviction proceedings over a failure to pay rent, but the case was ultimately dropped.
Police said the family came to the United States in 2015.
