HVAC technician Rasim Katanic was stabbed to death on the roof of the Tahoora Sweets & Bakery building in Chicago (via YouTube screengrab/WLS). Inset: Brandon Sanders, who has been charged with murder in Katanic’s death (via Chicago Police).
The man accused of stabbing an HVAC repairman to death on the roof of a bakery building may face even more charges after investigators reportedly discovered the body of a teenager in a freezer at the suspect’s home.
Brandon Sanders, 33, is accused of killing Rasim Katanic, 69, on the roof of Tahoor Sweets & Bakery, an Indian sweets shop in Chicago, Illinois. Sanders is alleged to have stabbed Katanic to death in broad daylight as the older man was working for his longtime client, according to reports.
“My dad was slaughtered,” Katanic’s daughter Aido Sutardjo told Chicago ABC station WLS. She said that her dad “was at the right place, right time, but then somebody got access to him that shouldn’t have.”
Sanders allegedly used Katanic’s own screwdriver to carry out the attack, WLS reported.
“This is not was not the first time my dad was on that roof,” Sutardjo told the station. “This has been my dad’s long-term client for 10-plus years.”
Sutardjo said that her father survived the Bosnian War in the 1990s before coming to the U.S. Her uncle — Katanic’s brother — had gone missing and was never found, she told WLS.
Police sources told WLS that while investigating the stabbing, they found a teenager’s body in the freezer of Sanders’ home. According to the Sun-Times, that victim is 18-year-old Iman Al-Sarraj.
“My heart is shattered in a million pieces,” Al-Sarraj’s father, Khalil Sarraj, told the Sun-Times. “I will never, ever have a normal life, especially after I saw my daughter’s face and what the monster did to her.”
That separate investigation is ongoing, according to WLS.
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The Sun-Times story said that police are looking into similar missing persons cases in Montana, where Sanders had been arrested in 2019 and accused of forcing his wife into sex work. Sanders was charged with human trafficking, aggravated promotion of prostitution, and witness tampering, according to the story. His wife, who was in protective custody at the time, returned to her home country of Germany and refused to return to the U.S. for Sanders’ trial due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The judge eventually dropped the charges. A prosecutor in the case said that Sanders would likely have been sentenced to around 10 years in prison if convicted, the Sun-Times reported.
Sanders had reportedly been “acting erratically” in the hours leading up to Katanic’s stabbing. At around 2:20 p.m., he allegedly tried to open an account at a bank near the bakery, at one point calling the FBI’s National Threat Operations Center and reporting a “plot to overthrow the government,” according to the Sun-Times report.
Police were called, but Sanders apparently left the scene before they arrived. Surveillance footage shows him climbing a stairwell to a rooftop adjacent to where Katanic was working, according to the report.
The next day, a burglary was reported at an apartment very close to Tahoor Sweets. Prosecutors reportedly said that Sanders had used Katanic’s screwdriver to open a skylight to the apartment before shaving in a bathroom, removing his clothing, and switching it out with some of the residents’ clothes.
The Sun-Times, citing prosecutors, reported that Sanders was seen on surveillance footage shortly before 6:00 p.m. wearing some of the stolen clothing and Katanic’s keys hanging from his waistband. While inside a furniture store, he reportedly encountered his uncle and told him that he didn’t have to pay rent “because his landlord was on the roof and he took care of that.”
He later flagged down a cop and asked to be taken to a hospital. His lawyer reportedly said at Sanders’ bail hearing that “there are some issues with a mental state.”
Sanders is being held without bond.
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