>Elias Syriani made the news in Charlotte, North Carolina for the brutal screwdriver murder of his wife Teresa in 1990. The couple were Arab Christians and Syriani had resided in Jordan prior to coming to America. He served in that country's army for 7 years and then worked as a machinist and a radio performer. Syriani married Teresa in an arranged marriage in 1974 and they moved to the US, living in Washington D.C. and Chicago before coming to North Carolina in 1986; they had four children and Syriani moved around looking for work when his employer, a glass factory in Chicago, went out of business.

>Teresa had been a "traditional" Middle Eastern woman who wore a hijab until she got a job at a Charlotte gas station and began wearing makeup and American clothing which angered her husband. They increasingly argued over the late '80s and eventually she decided to divorce Elias and get a restraining order put on him. On July 27, 1990, he confronted her in the driveway of their home and stabbed her 27 times with a screwdriver. She lived for almost a month afterward but finally died of a brain injury. Elias was convicted of her murder and sentenced to death; his children testified about his violent, abusive behavior over the years. He was executed in 2005, at 67 one of the oldest persons executed in the US since Furman v. Georgia.

Elias Syriani was the 38th person executed by North Carolina since 1976. He murdered his wife Teresa in 1990 in an argument and became one of the oldest people executed in the United States in the post-Furman era. Syriani was born to a Christian Arab family in Jerusalem, Mandate Palestine on January 7, 1938, one of six siblings. When he was 12 years old, Israeli authorities jailed his father, causing the latter to have a mental and physical breakdown that led to his early death. Elias was forced to go to work early and leave school as a result. The Syrianis moved to Jordan and Elias after his 18th birthday enlisted in the Jordanian army which he served in until 1965. After his military stint, he spent some time as a machinist and as a radio broadcaster.

In 1974 Syriani, by then in his mid-30s, decided he could afford to marry. He met 24 year old Teresa Yousef through a mutual friend; she was living in the United States and they corresponded and exchanged photos for three months before she flew to Jordan to tie the knot. The couple moved to the US and eventually had four children; Rose, John, Sarah, and Janet. They initially settled in Washington D.C. where Elias worked at a restaurant and learned English at night and then they moved to Chicago where he worked as a machinist for Protective Door. The company folded during the early 1980s economic recession and Syriani got another job at Kerr Glass Manufacturing. He stayed there until that employer went out of business in 1986 and moved his family to Charlotte, North Carolina where he began working for Midland Machine Co.