Last Sunday, as investigators were working to find a missing University of South Florida graduate student who was by then presumed dead, a kayaker cast a fishing line along a stretch of shoreline in north St. Petersburg.
The line snagged on a black trash bag, prompting the fisherman to venture into some mangroves to free it, Hillsborough Sheriff Chad Chronister told reporters at a news conference Friday. The man smelled a foul odor.
“He sees that the plastic bag has been open, there’s been salt water in there,” Chronister said. “He can’t tell what it is, but it looks like a human body.”
The body was that of Nahida Bristy, the 27-year-old missing student who investigators had been searching for, Chronister confirmed at the news conference.
Because Bristy’s body was in advanced stages of decomposition, investigators had to use DNA and dental records to make the confirmation, Chronister said. The body was also clad in clothing that appeared to be what Bristy was wearing when she was last seen.
The announcement was the latest development in a double-murder case that has shaken USF’s Tampa campus and left two families and the city’s broader Bangladeshi community in mourning. Bristy and her friend and fellow graduate student, Zamil Limon, also 27, were from that country and attending USF on student visas.
“Our community has been left heartbroken and the victims’ families shattered after this tragic loss,” Chronister said.
By the time of the kayaker’s discovery, Bristy was presumed dead, Limon’s body had been found in a trash bag on the Howard Frankland Bridge and one of his roommates, 26-year-old Hisham Abugharbieh, had been arrested on two counts of first-degree murder, along with several other charges.
The Tampa Bay Times has reported many details of the investigation, outlined in court documents that led to Abugharbieh’s arrest. At Friday’s news conference, Chronister went over the timeline and provided some new insight into the case that spanned two counties.
Bristy was last seen April 16 and reported missing to USF police on April 17. Limon was reported missing the next day.
“They were dedicated students and loyal friends,” Chronister said. “They were accountable and responsible, which is why when they didn’t show up to meetings, stopped answering calls and missed appointments, their friends immediately knew something was very wrong. What began as a missing persons case ended with the discovery of a monstrous crime.”
Detectives went to Limon’s apartment at the Avalon Heights Apartments, an off-campus complex where many USF students live. Limon lived there with two roommates. One of them was Abugharbieh, who was “elusive” and “deceptive” and gave inconsistent information, Chronister said.
Hisham Abugharbieh [ Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office ]
The other roommate was cooperative and provided the first big break in the case when he told detectives that the apartment’s doormat and some other items were missing. Detectives went immediately to the complex’s dumpster, where they found Limon’s glasses, student ID, wallet and clothes, which were “extremely bloodied,” Chronister said.
At that point, the sheriff’s office announced that Limon and Bristy were considered endangered. Abugharbieh was a person of interest in the case and the sheriff’s office had placed him under surveillance, Chronister said.
Detectives got a search warrant for the apartment and used a forensic blood detector to find what had been a large pool of blood in the kitchen that continued into Abugharbieh’s bedroom.
“The technology is so precise and finite that we can see the outline of a human being on the floor next to our suspect’s bed where it was curled up in a fetal position,” Chronister said.
Investigators examined Abugharbieh’s phone, which had been “wiped clean,” Chronister said. “No text messages, no emails, no GPS data.”
But a deeper dive into the device, Chronister said, showed searches and ChatGPT queries asking questions such as whether a knife can penetrate a skull, can a neighbor hear a gunshot, can you put a body in a trash bag and throw it in the dumpster.
“These searches were conducted days before our two victims went missing,” Chronister said. “This was calculated. This is what makes this so premeditated.”
Abugharbieh couldn’t explain where he got a deep cut on his arm and one on his pinky, which investigators now believe were “defensive wounds,” Chronister said.
Investigators found blood on the floorboard of his car and much more in the trunk, which detectives later confirmed was Nahida’s, according to Chronister.
Detectives used Abugharbieh’s phone and surveillance video to determine he drove his car to Sand Key in Clearwater, remained there for a short period and then on his way back, stopped for a short time on the Howard Frankland Bridge.
Based on the phone location, Hillsborough detectives drove north on the bridge and spotted a large trash bag on the shoulder.
“They stop, they walk up, and as they’re approaching it, they immediately smell that unique smell of human remains when it’s in that decomposition phase,” Chronister said. “They physically feel the outside of it and realize that there are human remains there.”
Investigators confirmed the body was Limon’s by using fingerprints that he provided to the Department of Homeland Security when he entered the country. He’d been bound in the front and his legs were almost completely severed to make the body easier to fit into the bag, Chronister said
“As gruesome as this murder was, he was literally left on the side of the highway like a piece of trash,” the sheriff said.
On April 24, about the same time as the body was discovered, Abugharbieh’s family called the sheriff’s office to report a domestic battery incident involving him and his sister at the family’s home in the Lake Forest neighborhood, off Bruce B. Downs Boulevard in north Tampa.
Deputies went to the home and Abugharbieh refused to come out. Hours later, about the time the SWAT team decided to enter the home, he came out and surrendered, Chronister said.
The sheriff’s office arrested him on several charges including battery, false imprisonment, tampering with evidence, failure to report a death and unlawfully holding or moving a dead body. The agency announced the next day that prosecutors were tacking on two first-degree murder counts.
Confronted with evidence, Abugharbieh claimed that he’d given Limon and Bristy a ride to Clearwater and dropped them off there at their request, records state.
“I think the concerning part is that he was nonreactive,” Chronister said. “He was callous and showed zero emotion, even when we confronted him with information that we had.”
On Sunday, as sheriff’s divers were searching the waters of Tampa Bay near the Howard Frankland Bridge for Bristy, the fishing kayaker called to report his discovery.
Chronister said investigators believe, but were still working to confirm, that Bristy and Limon were killed at or near the same time in the Avalon Heights apartment. They also suspect he used a cart used by residents at the complex to get the bodies to his car late at night, Chronister said.
During a status hearing Tuesday morning, Abugharbieh’s public defender waived a pretrial detention hearing, and Judge J. Logan Murphy agreed to have him be held in jail without bail.
Abugharbieh pursued a Bachelor of Science degree in management from spring 2021 to 2023, but he is no longer enrolled as a student, according to USF.
Chronister said the third roommate described Abugharbieh’s behavior as disturbing and erratic, prompting him and Limon to complain to the complex management and asked for him to be relocated.
Hillsborough State Attorney Suzy Lopez and Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced in a news release Wednesday that their respective offices would work together to examine Abugharbieh’s interactions with ChatGPT and “assess whether those interactions contributed to the commission of crimes, and evaluate any potential legal responsibility of ChatGPT and its developer, OpenAI.”
Chronister said Friday that the company was cooperating with the investigation and that detectives hope to get more information from the company. He said that information might help them determine a motive in the case, which so far has remained elusive.
“You search for the truth, and second to that is, you search for the why,” Chronister said. “I hope we find that out.”
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