The widow of a man murdered in a road rage shooting is sharing her experience that day.
Idalia Cerna was in the passenger seat when her husband, 24-year-old Hamzah Faraj, was shot and killed in September 2021.
Wearing both their wedding rings is how Cerna keeps her late husband's memory close at hand and heart.
“It’s like a promise that we had that we were always going to love each other and be together forever,” said Cerna.
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Faraj was a teenager in 2013 when he and his mom fled from Iraq to Fort Worth for a better life. He met Cerna in 2017 through mutual friends.
“He was a very kind person, very funny person,” said Cerna.
The couple married in 2020. He was killed the next year on September 11, 2021.
“It was just a regular day I didn't think that he might not be back,” said Cerna.
Faraj worked part-time as a food delivery driver.
He dropped off an order in Fort Worth when Cerna, who was in the passenger seat, says a gray pick-up truck pulled really close to them at the intersection of Altamesa Boulevard and Kingswood Drive.
“He [Faraj] hit the horn. They hit it back,” Cerna recalled. “The truck passed by us. They put the window down so the window went down and up, then all of a sudden, we just heard, I heard the shots.
Cerna says bullet shrapnel struck her in the head. “I tried to wake him up but he didn't respond,” said Cerna, tearfully.
Cerna says Faraj was shot in the head and taken to the hospital, but didn't survive.
The suspect or suspects have never been identified.
“Why would they even do something like that? We didn't do anything to them. We didn't bother anybody. We were just working,” said Cerna.
Since the murder, Cerna says she's had to move away from Fort Worth.
“I lost our house. I lost everything,” she said. “I'm not the same person since that day.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR-DFW, announced this month that it is now involved with the case and is looking into the shooting as a potential hate crime.
Fort Worth detectives have not publicly called it a possible hate crime. Police say the suspect's truck may be a gray 4-door Dodge pick-up. Anyone with information on the case is asked to call Fort Worth police at 817-392-4382.
