The Long Ride Home

Özgecan Aslan was nineteen, a psychology student in Mersin province, in southern Turkey. On February 11, 2015, after an afternoon out with a friend, she boarded a white minibus home along the Tarsus–Mersin road. One by one the other passengers got off. She was the last one aboard.

The driver, Ahmet Suphi Altındöken, turned off the route and drove into a wooded area. Aslan fought him with pepper spray and her fingernails. He beat her, stabbed her in the neck and struck her with an iron pipe. He drove her to his father’s house and cut off her hands so the skin under her nails could not name him. She was still alive. His father, Necmettin Altındöken, burned her belongings, and with a friend, Fatih Gökçe, they drove her body to the Çamalan forest and set it on fire. Her remains were found on February 13.

The killing brought people into the streets in dozens of Turkish cities, with women posting accounts of their own assaults under a shared hashtag and men marching in skirts. In December 2015 all three defendants were sentenced to aggravated life imprisonment. In April 2016 another inmate shot Ahmet Suphi Altındöken dead in his cell and wounded his father. In July 2022 Turkey’s Court of Cassation upheld a separate sexual assault sentence of twenty-two years and six months for Gökçe, closing the case.