‘Absolutely gruesome murder,’ witness says of fatal Edmonton stabbing at women’s shelter

WARNING: This article contains graphic content that may be disturbing to some readers.

A quiet neighbourhood in west Edmonton was the site of shocking, brutal violence late last month.

Edmonton police say a woman was allegedly stabbed to death by another woman in the Hamptons neighbourhood on the evening of July 26.

A CityNews investigation has revealed the murder happened at a women’s shelter.

BACKGROUND: Woman charged with murder in fatal west Edmonton stabbing

This rare act of violence between two women is the first known homicide at a women’s shelter in Alberta.

CityNews is not reporting the location of the safehouse – only what police have already revealed – to protect others who may be staying there.

One neighbour described the attack as a chaotic, bloody scene.

“An absolutely gruesome murder in someone’s front yard,” said Kieran, who witnessed the homicide.

Kieran was walking his dog when he heard someone screaming down the street to call 911. He tells CityNews he saw a woman holding a knife.

“There was this woman, crouching over this other woman, stabbing her repeatedly in the head,” he said.

“She was crouched over her, holding on to her hair – stab, stab, stab.”

“Didn’t seem phased by the whole thing at all, like it was just another day.”

—Witness to Hamptons murder

That’s when Kieran approached her.

“I said, ‘What are you doing, what are you doing?’ I’m about 10 feet away from her, and she’s like, ‘It’s done, it’s finished, it’s over. She had it coming.’

“I told her to ‘stop, stop,’ and then she just paced around the driveway, and went back to the body. And I went a little closer and I told her, ‘hey look, she’s already dead, you can stop.’

“She (said), ‘I’m just grabbing something.’”

Kieran says the woman then grabbed slippers off the victim’s feet before going inside.

“She went, ‘I went to grab my slippers,’” he recounted. “She went and grabbed the slippers.

“Didn’t seem phased by the whole thing at all, like it was just another day.”

The witness says the woman went inside, changed her clothes, then came back out and waited for police, who arrested her a short time after.

“She stopped when I got there. Me throwing something at her, tackling, any of that sort of stuff wouldn’t have helped anyone. You just have to treat people as people, not as animals, even though they’re doing something animalistic.”

Woman charged with 2nd-degree murder

Edmonton police say they were called about a fight outside a home in the Hamptons neighbourhood around 9:40 p.m. on July 26.

They say they found a woman with life-threatening injuries after she was repeatedly stabbed. Police say she died in hospital from her wounds.

The victim was identified as 27-year-old Zubaria Khan.

Edmonton police arrested and charged 33-year-old Fahimah Rahimi with second-degree murder. The allegation against her has not been tested in court.

Authorities say the two women knew each other.

The violence has shaken the neighbourhood.

“Oof. That’s, like I said, a real shocker,” Edwin told CityNews. “Because we don’t know them per se personally, but knowing that… we’ve been here 20 years and it kind of gives us an uneasy feeling.”

Rare homicide at Canadian women’s shelter

The safehouse is run by Nisa Homes, part of the Nisa Foundation. The charity did not grant a for-the-record interview to CityNews.

According to their website, Nisa Homes is a “safe haven and support service for women and their children who are experiencing domestic violence, poverty, homelessness, or seeking asylum.”

Homicides at a women’s shelter are extremely rare in Canada.

CityNews found only a few records of such killings anywhere in the country in news archives dating back to the 1980s and earlier. These cases include the high-profile June 1999 murder of Ginette Roger by her husband Marcel Samson at a Quebec women’s shelter, and in 2009 when Winnipeg mother Nicole Redhead suffocated her two-year-old daughter in a women’s shelter.

There are, however, many more cases of women murdered by current or former intimate partners after they moved out from a women’s shelter.

One woman is killed by her current or former intimate partner every four days in Canada, according to the Alberta Council of Women’s Shelters.