Those Who Knew LAX Killer Say Personal Agenda Died With Him

A decade ago, Hesham Hadayet left behind a comfortable life and upper-class family in Egypt, gambling that a six-month tourist visa was his ticket to prosperity, American-style.

From the beginning, Hadayet took chances--first as a cab driver and later with his own business. He worked illegally. He overstayed the visa and applied for asylum. He bought a limousine he didn’t know how to drive.

“He told me how he landed at LAX” to begin his new life, recalled acquaintance Bob Milstead. “He took a cab, and it was expensive, and he thought, ‘Wow! I’m going to get into this. You can make a lot of money.’ ”

For a while, luck seemed to be with him. He avoided deportation when his wife won a lottery for permanent residency. He worked up to a two-limousine service and hired help. He lived with his wife and two sons in Irvine, the classic Southern California suburb. He was known as a quiet, observant Muslim who wanted people to believe he was running a successful business.

Despite the long hours, success was elusive. In recent months, Hadayet’s business teetered on the edge of collapse. He couldn’t keep up with his liability insurance and his wife began asking neighbors for baby-sitting work.

For all of that, Hadayet did little to suggest he might some day walk up to a Los Angeles International Airport ticket counter and start shooting people.

Yet that’s just what he did on the Fourth of July. Authorities say Hadayet killed El Al ticket agent Victoria Hen, 25, of Chatsworth and Yaakov Aminov, 46, of Valley Village before he was killed by an El Al security guard.

“We all thought it was someone else and they blamed it on Hesham,” said Tarek Oraby, 35, a Cairo native and former cab driver living in Garden Grove. “Nobody believes it .... People are asking, did he go crazy?”

In interviews with dozens of neighbors, business acquaintances and family members in Southern California and Cairo, the emerging consensus is that Hadayet was an ordinarily religious man with little appetite for politics, who opened fire at the El Al Israel Airlines ticket counter following a personal agenda that died with him.

“If someone is going to do a terrorist act, they wouldn’t park their car, then walk minutes to a terminal and then stand in line before they shoot someone,” said Medhat Mahmoud, a Los Angeles produce wholesaler and a former security official for Egypt Air who had known Hadayet since 1992. “It’s ridiculous.”

As investigators begin to believe that Hadayet was simply an overstressed man who snapped, Hadayet’s family refuses to accept any conclusion beyond the fact that Hadayet is dead.

Family Awaits Outcome

“All I want to know is: What will be the outcome of the investigation?” Hadayet’s widow, Hala Mohammed Sadeq al Awadly, said in Cairo, where she and the couple’s young sons have been vacationing since mid-June. “And from the investigation we should know exactly what happened and then we will know what the truth is.”

Born in Egypt on July 4, 1961, Hadayet grew up in a politically and religiously moderate family in Cairo’s middle-class Abbasiya neighborhood, where he attended the private St. George’s School before earning a degree in commerce from Cairo’s Ain Shams University in 1984.

The son and nephew of Egyptian military brass, Hadayet was exempted from military service as his family’s only son and embarked on a promising career at the Misr Iran Bank. By 30, he was chief of the securities and credit division, a job that usually goes to men in their mid-40s and older, relatives said.

Given that success, why he chose to move to the United States is unclear. One American acquaintance said Hadayet suggested his tenure at the bank ended badly. “He had to leave Egypt because he was in trouble there for some accounting thing he did,” said Milstead, who runs the Newport Beach-based limo service, Executive Transportation. “He said he was framed.”

Hadayet’s family denied he had a problem with the bank, and said his emigration grew from a years-long yearning to live in America. He first visited on a tourist visa in 1981, and signed up for a Social Security card at the agency’s Wilshire Boulevard office even though his visa did not allow him to work.

“Since he was 13 or 14 he wanted to go to America,” said Emad al Abd, 45, a cousin in Cairo. “He used to say, ‘It’s a beautiful country.’ He was like any young man, dreaming of a good life in the States.”

Hadayet met his future wife at the bank. Awadly’s father owned a clothing business and she regularly deposited checks for the company.

The couple complemented each other. Where Hadayet was quiet, calm and serious, Awadly was outgoing and talkative. About 1985, the couple married and moved in with her parents in a seventh-floor apartment in a middle-class neighborhood of Cairo as they awaited construction of an apartment Hadayet had bought elsewhere in the city.

In 1990, the couple’s first son, Omar, was born. Two years later, his cousin said, Hadayet left for America, following both his dream and the urging of an American-born boss at the bank. A few months later he sent for his wife and son.

“He was just traveling there to work. He was thinking he would go there and see how things went,” said Abd. “He didn’t need to go to the States because his financial position here was very secure. Why go if you don’t need to go? He already had such a good job so he would have risen so high if he’d stayed here.”

Hadayet arrived on a six-month visitor’s visa and apparently began working in violation of its terms. He applied for political asylum--allowing him to work--as the visa neared its expiration. The asylum application was rejected, but Hadayet was allowed to stay while he appealed.

His wife gave birth to a second son, Adam, at Saddleback Memorial Medical Center in Laguna Hills in June 1995. Two years later, as Hadayet faced deportation, she was granted permanent residency for the family through a routine Immigration and Naturalization Service lottery. A month later, Hadayet started his limousine business.

Like many immigrants, Hadayet had trouble adjusting to his new life, Abd said.

Adjustment Was Hard

“He had to start all over again. It was difficult to begin with. It was not what he expected when he left a bank here in Egypt to go to the States,” Abd said. “It’s hard when you feel you’ve gone down, but he insisted on sticking with it. He said it was quite difficult but he got used to it.”

At first, Hadayet worked part-time at a Bank of America office in Mission Viejo, said Mahmoud, the produce dealer. Bank of America officials, though, said they could find no record of Hadayet having worked there.

Needing extra income, Hadayet also began working as a cab driver, Mahmoud said.

But just a few days after starting the job, Hadayet was robbed. Mahmoud recalls telling his new friend that if he was going to continue to drive a cab, he should arm himself. Police say Hadayet was the registered owner of two guns--but “whether he took my advice then, I don’t know,” Mahmoud said.

Although Hadayet was well known in the tight world of airport cabbies, few of his colleagues ever got beyond cursory conversations.

“He was very quiet,” said Mike Parvinnia, who coordinates cabs outside John Wayne Airport. “He never said hello or goodbye. I know those people very well. I know them better than their fathers and mothers. But this guy, I didn’t know him.”

Hadayet quit as a cabby in 1997 to start a limousine business serving local companies. He dressed the part, invariably wearing dark suits behind the wheel, and even as he washed his vehicles outside the family’s apartment.

“He seemed to be very ambitious, conscientious,” said John Henningsen, a broker who sold Hadayet his business insurance in 1998 and 1999.

“He had big plans for his limousine company. He wanted to go places with it.”

Henningsen said Hadayet, whom he described as upbeat and determined to succeed, thought he could mine the high-tech industries near his Irvine home. “He was trying to break in and get contracts for the people from out of town going to visit these high-tech companies,” Henningsen said.

Hadayet bought a 28-foot limousine in November 1998, putting $3,000 down on the $30,000 vehicle and agreeing to $1,225 monthly payments.

Virgil Budnic, a limousine salesman, went with Hadayet to pick up the limo in Brentwood.

Budnic said Hadayet assured him he knew how to drive a stretch limousine, but then ripped a long gash on the passenger side when he hit a pole moments after slipping behind the wheel.

“He was not a very good driver,” Budnic said. “Apparently he had no idea how to maneuver the car ... of course he was very upset, and embarrassed.”

Hadayet’s business appeared to be growing in 1999, when he added a second vehicle, and for a time employed one or two other drivers. But any success faded fast. In 2000, he listed himself as his firm’s only driver. State Public Utility Commission records show that Hadayet’s liability insurance came close to being canceled several times before he was finally dropped in November 2001 for nonpayment.

The insurance cancellation should have kept him off the road, but fellow drivers and neighbors said Hadayet was still working. When asked, Hadayet rarely acknowledged that his business was having problems.

Abdallatef Aboulzahab, 36, a Syrian immigrant, worked for Hadayet in 2000 for less than a year before he was fired in what he described as a dispute over tips.

Aboulzahab said the bulk of Hadayet’s fares were business people flying into the area for meetings. Hadayet, he said, spent hours trying to drum up additional clients and complained about overhead costs.

“He operated the whole company by himself,” Aboulzahab said. “He did the maintenance himself. He’s always on the computer trying to get more customers. Business was slow .... One time he told me, ‘I pay $1,800 every month just to keep those cars on the street.’ ”

Violence Was a Surprise

While Hadayet occasionally mentioned a hatred for Israel, Aboulzahab saw it more as a cultural perspective on Mideast politics than an emotion that would fuel violence.

For example, Aboulzahab recalled a conversation in which Hadayet segued from annoyance at customers who stiffed him on fares into complaints about Israel.

“He told me he’d do what he was supposed to do and people would not pay him,” Aboulzahab said.

Hadayet then said Americans “were the No. 1 complainers in the world. He told me, ‘When they complain, they get everything they want. When we complain as Arabs, nobody listens.’ ”

Aboulzahab said Hadayet watched Arabic news on the satellite television station Al Jazeera and was upset about turmoil in the Middle East.

“He blamed Israel for what was going on over there.... He had nothing against Americans.... He’s not hateful for the American people on the street.... He loved this country. He loved freedom of speech. He told me, ‘I’d like to be a U.S. citizen. I like to pay my taxes. I want to raise my children here.’ ”

Hadayet’s business troubles deepened with the recession and the sharp drop in business travel after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

“After 9/11, business was really bad,” Milstead said. “He was over at my office and we were talking. He said the government was really stupid going after Osama bin Laden and that by the time they found out who it really was it would be too late.”

As a limo driver, Hadayet’s hours were long and late, and the time he spent at home was largely indoors, out of sight--and earshot--of neighbors of the family’s two-bedroom Irvine apartment. Although sometimes harsh with his family and unforgiving with his neighbors, Hadayet was not seen as a physical threat, just a difficult man who didn’t fit in.

In May 1996, Irvine police were summoned to the Hadayet apartment, where Hadayet and his wife each accused the other of assault. Police noted no signs of violence and prosecutors took no action. Last week, Awadly downplayed the incident as a marital spat that grew out of proportion and said her husband was not a violent man.

Neighbors viewed Hadayet as a strict father and Awadly a protective mother, while their sons were seen as typical American suburban kids, playing soccer and video games, riding skateboards and trading baseball cards, and occasionally talking their parents into giving their friends rides in the limousine.

To Hadayet’s wife, the family’s life was unremarkable, and Hadayet was a hard-working provider.

“He was correct, a perfectly decent Egyptian person,” Awadly said earlier this week. “He loves his children and his neighbors and his family and his friends. He is a normal person who goes from work to home and that’s it. A normal person. There is nothing to suggest he was a bad person or that he belonged to any groups.”

Issa Ziadeh, 43, had a similar view of Hadayet. The men shared heritages--both were Egyptian-born Muslims--and had similar jobs. Ziadeh is an airport shuttle driver.

He said he last saw Hadayet during evening prayers July 3 at a Garden Grove mosque, when Ziadeh accidentally turned off a small lamp Hadayet was using to read the Koran.

“He came up to me, very cool, very joking, and he said, ‘I knew it would have had to have been some Egyptian who turned my light off,’ ” Ziadeh said. “He was very relaxed.”

The two men exchanged small talk, prayed together and then went their separate ways.

A few hours later--early morning in California--Hadayet called his family in Egypt to mark his birthday.

Wearing his suit one last time, Hadayet armed himself with a knife, two guns and extra ammunition, and made his way to LAX.

Half a world away, Awadly’s grief is infused with a wife’s sense of guilt.

“I came here for two months, just for the summer,” she said, her voice breaking. “It has been the worst two months of my life. If I had been with Hesham in the U.S., this might never have happened.”

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Robyn Dixon reported from Cairo, Jack Leonard from Orange County and Rich Connell from Los Angeles. Also contributing were Times staff writers Greg Krikorian, Jennifer Oldham and Zanto Peabody in Los Angeles; Christine Hanley, Scott Martelle, Mai Tran and Irfan Khan in Orange County; Tim Reiterman in San Francisco and Jailan Zayan and Hany Fares in Cairo.