An Oklahoma man who allegedly shot and killed his Arab-American neighbor called the man’s family “filthy Lebanese” who “throw gay people off the roof,” according to Tulsa police.
Police say Stanley Vernon Majors, 61, shot and killed Khalid Jabara, 37, on Friday while Jabara was retrieving his mail on the porch. Majors was arrested Friday and is being held in a hospital. Tulsa police said they have not identified a motive, Tulsa police spokeswoman Leland Ashley told The Daily Beast. He has not been charged yet.
But less than a year ago, police recorded Majors making racist comments about the family just before he ran over Khalid’s mother in his car.
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On Sept. 12, 2015, Tulsa police officer Steven Theimer responded to a call from Majors about a car parked the wrong way in the street. When Theimer inquired further into his dispute with the Jabaras, Majors became “fairly abrasive,” calling them “filthy Lebanese” and charging that “they throw gay people off the roof,” Theimer testified during a preliminary hearing for Majors’s hit-and-run in April.
Majors married Stephen Schmauss in December 2014, according to their Oklahoma marriage license.
The image of masked men throwing gay people off buildings was popularized by ISIS militants, who promote videos of the punishment online. The terrorist group has killed thousands of Muslims across the Middle East, but reserves a special kind of vitriol for families like the Jabaras, who are Christians.
Three hours after his racist rant, Majors ran over Haifa Jabara with his car, leaving her with head trauma, a collapsed lung, and several broken bones. Majors was arrested nearby, his car damaged and bloody. He told police that Haifa had jumped in front of his car, and later that a rabbit had run in front of the vehicle, causing him to swerve into her, according to court documents.
Majors was charged with assault and battery with a deadly weapon. But while awaiting trial, he was released on bond and allowed to move back in—without an ankle monitor, the Jabaras said—next to the woman he was accused of nearly killing, who already had a restraining order against him.
“This man was a known danger,” Victoria Jabara wrote on Facebook following her brother’s death. “My family lived in fear of this man and his hatred for years.”
Their ugly history began in August 2013 when Haifa Jabara accused Majors of “knocking at windows late at nite, harassing me with ugly sex words over the phone” in her petition for a restraining order. “He is very racist towards forigners [sic] and blacks.”
A judge ordered Majors stay 300 yards away from Jabara, whose petition also alleged Majors beat his 76-year-old husband.
“He lives with an old man which he was very kind to us,” she wrote. “He physically abuse him.”
By July 2014, Majors retaliated by filing a restraining order against Khalid, accusing his neighbor of stalking him and breaking in to vandalize his property.
“Kalid jabarra [sic] has trespassed onto my property, he lives next door,” Majors wrote in a complaint to the Tulsa police. “He refuses to stop comeing [sic] onto my property and damaged my kitchen cabinets by throwing paint thinner on them and rubbing alcohol on them.”
“He trashed my living room, kitchen when I was gone,” Majors added. “He parks his cars on my driveway and refuses to move them, smokes pot in my house.”
Grainy black-and-white photographs accompanying a subsequent restraining order show stained kitchen cabinets and a messy apartment.
Majors’s attorney sent Khalid a cease and desist letter demanding $1,800 in damages and warning him to stay off Majors’s property. A final order of protection in January 2015 forbade Khalid from having any contact with Majors and required him to stay 30 feet away from his neighbor. Records say the suit for damages was settled out of court.
Despite two protection orders—one by Majors against Khalid and one against Majors by Haifa—he allegedly stood in the Jabaras’ driveway in March 2015, telling the mother “fuck you,” and “I want to kill you,” according to a police report.
Victoria says police should have taken Majors’s escalating actions more seriously, especially in light of recent anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant hate crimes.The family had been on edge after learning from another neighbor that Majors had obtained a gun. When Khalid heard knocking at the window—behavior his mother had reported in her 2013 restraining order against Majors—he called the police, who investigated the scene, but declared the area clear.
When Khalid stepped outside to retrieve his mail just minutes later, he was shot four times.
“He was a kind spirit, loving brother, uncle and son. Khalid’s heart was big,” Victoria wrote of our brother. “He cared for our entire family, our friends and people he didn’t even know. He created every Jabara family joke and filled our lives with love and laughter. All of that has been taken away from us by this hateful man and a system that failed to protect our community.”
