Judge sentences man who decapitated his wife: ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a case like this’

Hours before Ahmad Shareef was arrested for killing his wife, he called his mother and confessed.

“I cut her head off,” he told her, according to the affidavit of probable cause for his arrest.

On Monday, Shareef, 37, was sentenced to 16 to 42 years in prison in the decapitation death of Leila Al Raheel inside the couple’s Northeast Philadelphia home. Shareef pleaded guilty to third-degree murder and related crimes in the November 2022 slaying.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a case like this,” said Common Pleas Court Judge Charles Ehrlich.

New details of the killing also surfaced during the hearing.

After Shareef confessed to his mother, she asked a neighbor to go to her son’s home in the 300 block of Magee Avenue and check on Al Raheel, according to the affidavit. The neighbor found Al Raheel dead in the dining room, she later told police.

Officers who responded to the house discovered Al Raheel’s headless body on the kitchen floor, the affidavit said. They found Shareef about four miles away, hiding in bushes in front of a house. His sweatpants, the document said, were stained red with blood.

Inside a police interview room, Shareef waived his Miranda rights, according to the affidavit. He told detectives he’d argued with Al Raheel after she had called him names.

Then, he said, he cut off her head with a kitchen knife.

In court Monday, the neighbor described how discovering Al Raheel’s body upended her life. She said she has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. “This isn’t something that time simply erases,” she said.

No one testified on Shareef’s behalf. His mother, who had been expected to appear, was ill and unable to attend, his defense attorney, Gregg Blender, said.

Al Raheel, who came to the U.S. with Shareef and his family in 2011, “has no family to speak on her behalf,” said the prosecutor, Maggie McDermott.

The judge imposed a sentence slightly below the prosecution’s request of 23 to 47 years, after Shareef’s attorney urged him to consider his client’s traumatic childhood and long-standing mental illness, which he said went largely untreated.

As a child, Shareef moved with his mother from Kuwait to Iraq and later to Syria, fleeing both war and abusive men who, Blender said, subjected them to violence. At the insistence of his family, Shareef later married Al Raheel, a neighbor, Blender said.

In the U.S., Shareef was treated repeatedly for mental health crises, Blender said. In 2012, he was hospitalized after striking himself and cutting his wrists, and in 2019, Blender said, Shareef stabbed himself in the neck.

Blender urged the judge to weigh what he described as his client’s “horrific upbringing” against what he acknowledged was “nothing less than a horrific crime.”

McDermott called the killing the “peak of domestic violence” and “unspeakably awful,” and warned that Shareef posed a continuing danger. If he was capable of such violence toward someone he loved, she argued, then even strangers were at risk.

Ehrlich said the sentence reflected both Shareef’s traumatic past and the threat he posed going forward.

“To sever a head with a kitchen knife takes a lot of effort,” he said. “Mr. Shareef, you have lived a life of horrors. I don’t think anyone in this courtroom disputes that.” The question, he added, was what needed to be done to protect others.

“I’m very concerned about the future — I’m going to be honest with you,” the judge said. “What happened to you as a child was not your fault. But people with this kind of damage can hurt others.”

After the slaying, neighbors told The Inquirer that several people had been living in the house, which had become an eyesore on the block. Shareef, they said, stood out: He behaved aggressively to other residents, and sometimes appeared outside wearing only underwear.

Since late 2016, police responded to more than 50 calls on the 300 block of Magee Street for domestic disturbances, reports of weapons, and other complaints. However, police would not disclose exact addresses, and it remains unclear how many of those calls — if any — originated from the home Shareef shared with Al Raheel, where she was eventually killed.

The city’s Department of Licenses and Inspections also confirmed that inspectors visited the house more than a year before Al Raheel was killed, following reports that the house’s garage was being used as a living space. But the inspectors weren’t able to gain access to the property, according to the department. Instead, they issued violations for weeds and combustible storage.