A Mother's Vigil: The Retrial That Haunts Sacramento

The night Nadine Yehya’s son never came home, she was doing what any parent would do—checking her phone, sending messages, waiting. It was April 29, 2023, and Karim Abou Najm, a UC Davis student, had been biking home when he was attacked at Sycamore Park. Nadine didn’t know that yet. She only knew the sirens she heard, the empty driveway where his bike should have been, and the silence when he wouldn’t answer.

That waiting—that specific, terrible uncertainty of a parent reaching out into the dark—is what filled the Sacramento courtroom on Monday when Nadine testified in the retrial of Carlos Dominguez, the man accused of her son’s death. She recounted seeing Karim that morning before his presentation at UC Davis, the police patrol cars she noticed while walking with a friend just after 9 p.m., the growing dread when she got home and realized he wasn’t there.“So that night I couldn’t sleep because he didn’t answer my call or see the messages,”she told the court. It wasn’t until the next morning—when she learned about another stabbing through the Nextdoor app—that her worst fears began to crystallize. By 10 a.m., police confirmed what she already somehow knew: her son had been killed.

The case against Dominguez carries the weight of a community still processing multiple violent attacks. He’s accused of killing two men and seriously injuring a woman in a series of incidents that shattered the sense of safety in neighborhoods where people thought they were just biking home or going about their lives. At his first trial, jurors found him not guilty of first-degree murder but couldn’t agree on other charges, resulting in a mistrial. That hung jury means Dominguez can’t be retried on that top charge—a legal reality that’s forced prosecutors to pursue second-degree murder instead, the most severe option now available.

This 12-week retrial isn’t just about courtroom procedure or legal strategy. It’s about a mother testifying again, reliving the moment her son disappeared, answering questions about the night that split her life into before and after. It’s about whether a jury, given another chance, will see the evidence the same way the first one didn’t. And it’s a reminder that behind every legal technicality and procedural decision are families like Nadine’s, who don’t get the luxury of moving on while the system figures out what justice looks like.