Fahim Saleh’s sister, Ruby Saleh, posted a heartfelt tribute to her brother on Thursday, a month after the tech CEO was murdered and dismembered inside his Manhattan apartment.
Ruby Angela Saleh wrote a long essay and published a video statement in the blogging platform Medium titled, “Mourning my baby brother, Fahim.” She recounted her fond memories of her beautiful brother and how the family remains heartbroken over their irreparable loss.
"My family and I are in such shock and debilitating pain," said Ruby, the victim's sister. "Our beautiful boy was taken from us, and it doesn't feel like life can ever be joyful again."
She recounted how on July 13, her 33-year-old brother had just returned from a three-mile run when he was fatally attacked.
Fahim’s former executive assistant, Tyrese Haspil, 21, has been charged with stabbing and dismembering his one-time boss after allegedly embezzling more than $90,000 from him. Fahim reportedly had offered to not call the police if Haspil repaid him in installments.
She called Fahim, "brilliant, creative, spontaneous, whimsical, and generous to a fault."
“Sometimes it still doesn’t feel real that Fahim is gone. And sometimes it feels too precisely like the cruel, heinous, and unbearable reality that it is, letting me see nothing but darkness and feel nothing but piercing pain in every quadrant of my heart,” she wrote.
“Fahim’s brain was a bottomless magic hat of ideas big and small, wacky and serious, local and global,” Ruby wrote of the tech whiz, who was the CEO of Nigerian ride-hailing motorcycle app Gokada and co-founder of Pathao.
“You never knew what he was going to pull out next, but he got to work on every idea immediately. He couldn’t let one sit; he was too excited to usher the vision in his head into the world for the rest of us to enjoy,” she wrote.
View this post on InstagramFam4life @rubyforreal @riffyyy
A post shared by Fahim Saleh (@fahims) on Dec 28, 2017 at 5:36am PST
Ruby said how the family found its way to the United States, moving from Bangladesh to Saudi Arabia, eventually settling in Louisiana. Her family struggled financially but her brother's entrepreneurial spirit was on display at an early age, she writes.
She said her family was broke when they moved from Saudi Arabia to America, where her father worked as a computer programmer in Louisiana. Fahim’s upbringing resonated with him after he made it in the tech industry.
“Having come from so little, Fahim had zero interest in being a rich entrepreneur who only hung out with other rich entrepreneurs,” Ruby wrote. “His heart was most open to those in need. ‘These drivers depend on me,’ he would say when talking about Gokada, the motorbike-hailing app he developed in Nigeria. Just as he had once been determined to ease our father’s hardships, he later dedicated himself to easing the hardships of countless others.”
View this post on InstagramA post shared by Fahim Saleh (@fahims) on Dec 16, 2019 at 7:00pm PST
"While we were growing up, I felt more like a mother to Fahim than a sister. When he was a toddler too wild to finish a meal, I ran after him with spoonfuls of rice and chicken. I gave him baths, I changed his diapers, and I was petrified the first time I saw his nose bleed." wrote Ruby, who is eight years older than her brother.
“Now, our father spends his days sitting next to Fahim's dog, Laila, speaking to her in the same affectionate tone he reserved for my brother, watching videos of or reading about the accomplishments of his deceased son.
“My mother spends her days crying. At night, she cannot sleep,” she added.
