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Teen smothers wealthy mother, tosses her body from mansion window: Prosecutor
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A Michigan teenage boy is accused of murdering his mother after autopsy results indicated she was smothered before falling out of a second-story window of her home, Detroit’s ABC7 reports.

Muhammad Altantawi, 16, was arrested in August for pushing his mother out of the window and causing her death.

On Friday, the teen was charged with first-degree murder – he was initially charged with second-degree murder – after Dr. Ruben Ortiz-Reyes, a forensic pathologist with the Oakland County Medical Examiner’s Office, determined that 35-year-old Nada Huranieh died from asphyxiation prior to being pushed out of the window.

“One of the main findings indicates that the deceased was dead at the time the scrape happened,” Dr. Ortiz-Reyes said, according to Fox2.

Officer Nathan Jordan, the first Farmington Hill police officer to respond to the scene, testified at a hearing Friday that he arrived on the scene to find Altantawi doing chest compressions on his mother’s body with one hand while calling 911 with other.

READ More: Police: Mom plunges to her death after teen son pushes her out of 2nd story mansion window

Jordan sent the teen and his younger sister to flag down the fire department while he stayed with the mother. While there, he noticed a rag that smelled of chemicals close to the body and an open window on the second-story.

“Then we started noticing that the positioning of her body was not what you would expect from someone falling out of the window and we were trying to figure out how she could have landed that way and it appeared that something struck that little ledge … and I remember thinking something was off because that’s not how someone would normally land if they fell,” Jordan said in court on Friday.

The teen told officers that he hadn’t seen his mother since 8 p.m. the night before, but she often woke early to clean the house.

When police searched the home, they found a ladder with a bottle of window cleaner next to the open window. Police suspected foul play, however, because the body was lying face up and her feet were facing away from the house, indicating that she didn’t just fall out of the window.

Carolyn Markowitz, Huranieh’s divorce attorney, said her client was estranged from her husband and in the middle of a divorce at the time of her death. She believes the teen sympathized with his father and thought his mother was becoming too Americanized and leaving behind Muslim tradition.

Altantawi remains in custody. His next hearing is set for December.

[Feature Photo: Nada Huranieh/Twitter]