Murdered New York tech entrepreneur’s personal assistant is arrested

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The personal assistant of Fahim Saleh, the tech entrepreneur who was found decapitated and dismembered in his $2.2million Manhattan apartment, has been arrested. 

Tyrese Devon Haspil, 21, was arrested early Friday over the grisly murder of the 33-year-old in his Lower East Side apartment earlier this week, the New York Times reported, citing two officials briefed on the matter. 

Haspil, who worked as Saleh’s personal assistant, is expected to be charged with second degree murder and other counts, the officials said.  

Detectives believe Saleh was killed after he found out his assistant had stolen tens of thousands of dollars from him, sources told the outlet. The slaying occurred even after Saleh set up a payment plan for Haspil to repay the money he allegedly stole instead of reporting him to authorities. 

Authorities started investigating Haspil after finding messages in which Saleh accused Haspil of stealing the money.   

Police, who have not yet publicly announced Haspil’s arrest, believe Saleh was killed on Monday, which is a day before his body was found by his sister when she went to his apartment.  

Investigators believe the killer returned to Saleh’s apartment on Tuesday to clean up and dismember the tech entrepreneur’s body, but fled through a back exit after being interrupted by the victim’s sister.     

When Saleh’s body was discovered, it had been decapitated and dismembered. His torso was found in the corner of his living room, with his head, arms, and legs separated into plastic bags. 

An electric saw that was still plugged in, a vacuum cleaner and cleaning products were found nearby. 

Autopsy results released on Thursday revealed that Saleh was tasered and then stabbed multiple times before being dismembered.

Authorities say Haspil used Saleh’s credit card to pay for a car to take him to Home Depot to purchase cleaning supplies. Sources told the NY Daily News that he also purchased the saw using the credit card.

A prong from the taser had a serial number that also allegedly linked Haspil to the scene, the sources said.  

Saleh had last been seen alive just over 25 hours prior to his body being discovered.

Surveillance footage from inside the 265 East Houston apartment building showed Saleh walking into an elevator at about 1.40pm on Monday with the assailant – dressed in a black suit, tie, mask and holding a large bag – following closely behind him. 

Investigators say Saleh, who was dressed in shorts and a t-shirt, appeared suspicious when the masked-man fumbled with the elevator, which requires the use of a key fob to operate.   

As the doors opened directly in Saleh’s full-floor apartment on the seventh-floor, words were said to be exchanged between the pair before the tech guru collapsed to the ground.

A struggle then ensured between Saleh and the assailant but the elevator doors closed, obscuring the camera’s view of what happened next. 

When the killer returned the following day to clean up, police believe the masked butcher may have been interrupted by Saleh’s sister when she stopped by her brother’s apartment to check in on him, having not seen or heard from him in more than a day. 

His sister like pressed the buzzer of Saleh’s apartment before entering the building, alerting the killer and forcing him to abandon his efforts to dispose of the remains. 

The killer is believed to have fled the building through a fire escape while his victim’s sibling rode the elevator up, police said. 

Saleh, who was born in Saudi Arabia but grew up in New York in a Bengali family, bought his luxury apartment for $2.25 million last year, records show. 

Police sources said initially they believed the murder was financially motivated and likely the fatal result of a soured business deal.

Prior to the personal assistant’s arrest, investigators had been looking into Saleh’s business affairs for any possible motives or suspects. 

Saleh was the chief executive officer of a ride-hailing motorcycle startup called Gokada that began operating in Nigeria in 2018. 

The firm, Gokada, recently faced severe setbacks after being banned earlier this year by the Nigerian government. It was forced to lay off staff and pivot from being a ride-sharing service to a delivery courier. 

The ban came at a difficult moment for Gokada which had just raised $5.3 million in funding from Rise Capital, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm, in May 2019. 

After the ban was enacted, the firm stopped bringing in money and around 800 bikers working for Gorkada were also immediately laid off. 

Saleh was working on new ideas and a new direction for the firm.  

At the time of his death, Saleh was also being sued by a former prison guard turned criminal who was jailed for using his app PrankDial, which he founded in 2015, to secretly record and listen to employees’ phone calls. 

The app let Kirk Eady, the former deputy director of Hudson County Correctional Facility, place a call between two employees without them knowing he was behind it, then listen to whatever they said. 

He listened to their complaints about him and about their jobs then retaliated against them in the workplace, according to prosecutors.

He was jailed for 15 months and in 2017 and sued Saleh for fraud, claiming the app made him think what he was doing was legal. 

Revealed: Humble beginnings of tech CEO who credited his love of computer games as a teen to developing Nigeria motorbike-sharing app that drew in millions of dollars from investors  

Fahim Saleh was born in July 1986 into a middle-class Bengali family in Saudi Arabia. Along with his two sisters – Rif Saleh and Ruby Bashir – he and his parents eventually settled in Rochester, New York.

But even as a youngster, Saleh was said to already be dreaming of earning money and found that his interest in computers could help to realize those dreams.

As a young teen, his enthusiasm for the internet which was still in its infancy at the time, led him to researching Google’s founder and other big tech names during the dot com boom of the late 1990s.

After spending hours playing computer games, he decided to turn his computer wizardry to building a website. 

He started small and began with a simple site for his family – Salehfamily.com. It would draw in around five visitors a month, mostly driven by his proud father who would send friends and relatives to look at the pages. 

But by the age of 15, Saleh began to develop a knack for programming and set up a blogging site just for his friends. 

What started as a teen hangout (teenhangout.com), ended up turning into a blogging forum for the community as more people heard about the site and began to publish articles. Finally, money slowly began to come in to the tune of around $3 a month.

A blog notes how at high school, however, Saleh was drawing a profit of between $100,000 and $150,000 a year as he created websites that focused on young people.  

After leaving school, he attended Bentley University in Boston, Massachusetts where he studied Computer Information Systems and developed a Facebook app  which allowed students to have food delivered. 

He then set up a phone-pranking phone app that would let a user choose a prank call before calling up their friends to hear their surprised reaction. 

What started off generating about $20 a day soon grew to $1,000.  Saleh notes in an article for Medium  that PrankDial.com has generated $10million during its lifetime. 

The website still brings in about $1-2million a year and allowed Saleh to set up more companies: TapFury, an entertainment company, and Ninja Fish which had a focus on gaming. 

With money being generated, literally while he slept, he set up a venture firm that would allow him to invest in startups in the developing world. 

His current focus was on a Nigerian transport service app called Gokada – essentially an Uber for motorbikes –  which was co-founded by Saleh in 2018. 

The initial idea was to have people transported across Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, by motorcycle. 

In its first year of operation, Gokada was said to have secured 1,000 bikes giving around 5,000 rides across the crowded city each day. 

But the firm ran into difficulty in February of this year after a ban went into effect that expressly forbid motorbike taxis.  

The ban came suddenly and without warning after the Lagos state government said a ban was needed because of ‘accidents, and disorderliness caused by the vehicles’.

As a result of the ban, commuters were left stranded and many were forced to travel on packed public transport instead.

The firm stopped bringing in money and around 800 bikers working for Gorkada were o immediately laid off.  

The ban came at a difficult moment for Gokada which had just raised $5.3 million in funding from Rise Capital, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm, in May 2019. 

‘As a business, we kind of have to just roll with the punches and a lot of those people that we had to lay off were very focused on the transport sector of the business,’ Saleh told CNN earlier this year. 

In an emotional plea to Nigerian officials to reverse the decision in February, Saleh said: ‘It’s not my country. It’s a country that I feel has amazing potential and amazing people and an opportunity to shine. 

‘The drivers, every one of them, wasn’t there because they just wanted to make money. They were there because they had families, children, dreams, they wanted to start businesses. They wanted to go to school.

‘They had degrees already but they couldn’t find jobs. We were hoping that a lot of these drivers wouldn’t be drivers forever, we were hoping that we could place them in higher jobs in Gokada and create a beautiful community which was developing slowly and,it was really something that moved me to the point where I was OK putting all my money in, all my effort in.

‘Gokada is not just a business. We do things that nobody else did at the time.

‘This has definitely been a blow.’  

The company decided to attempt to pivot and become a delivery and logistics company with a new boat hailing service that would run vessels that could hold up to 24 people – but then the global pandemic struck, putting future plans on hold.

‘The drivers here at Gokada, were not there to make money, they were here because they had families, they have children, they have dreams,’ Saleh told Nirametrics.

‘They want to start businesses, they want to go to school, they have degrees already, but they couldn’t find jobs. For many, Gokada wasn’t the final place for their life. It was a stepping stone to get to that next endeavor.’

‘What I will tell you is that Gokada is not just a business, it’s a mission. And every part of that mission is to always be safe, provide jobs.’