Suit filed against estate of man who killed family over gambling debts

Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2000 | 11:04 a.m.

Brian Bakian of Birmingham sued in Oakland County Circuit Court on Monday, claiming Jihad Hassan Moukalled owed him $271,000. The suit said the loan, due last April, had a 10 percent annual interest rate.

The suit also accuses Moukalled with fraud, claiming he borrowed the money contending it would be invested in his company, Great Lakes Color Printers Inc. of Oak Park.

The suit seeks to prevent Moukalled's assets from being sold, transferred or otherwise disposed of.

"He was a very good friend of Jihad and he just wants to protect his interests while he tries to work things out with the family," Bakian's lawyer, Victor J. Zanolli III, told The Oakland Press of Pontiac for an article published Tuesday.

"It's certainly not adversarial at this point."

Police say that hours after Moukalled returned, distraught, from a trip to Las Vegas the day before Thanksgiving, he suffocated his children, then shot his wife and himself in the master bedroom of the family's Farmington Hills home.

Police Chief William Dwyer said Moukalled had gambled large sums in Las Vegas and Atlantic City in the past two years. He left a suicide note in which he begged for forgiveness.

"There is nothing more destructive to life than gambling," he wrote in the note. "A drug addict destroys his life, a gambler destroys his life and the lives of those he cares about and care about him."