Apex husband pleads guilty to killing wife, dumping body in Jordan Lake

Hadeel Ghadhanfer Hikmat’s case ended where it began to feel most impossible, at Jordan Lake, with the husband prosecutors said put her there admitting guilt. Omar Matthew Ibrahim Drabick, 37, pleaded guilty Monday to second-degree murder in Hikmat’s death, a move that took the case out of trial posture and into sentencing.

Under the agreement, Drabick will serve 25 to 31 years for murder, plus six to nine years for concealing a death, with the sentences running consecutively. The plea replaced the original first-degree murder charge and concealment count that had followed the investigation since September 2023, when Drabick was arrested after prosecutors focused on his role in the killing.

Hikmat was 34 when her body was found on Aug. 29, 2023, near Farrington Point Boat Ramp in Jordan Lake. An autopsy later determined she had been shot in the upper back before her body was dumped into the water, turning a missing-person search into a homicide case with a clear but brutal endpoint. CBS 17 reported that the body was thrown from a Chatham County bridge, and the plea resolved that central accusation without a trial that would have revisited the sequence in full.

The search for answers had already pulled in two homes and two cities. Chatham County sheriff’s investigators searched 736 Treviso Lane in Apex, where Hikmat and Drabick lived, and 1916 Wescott Drive in Raleigh, the home of her in-laws. Hikmat’s brother, Firas Hikmat, came from Istanbul to identify and claim her body, and he said he last heard from her on Aug. 28, 2023, one day before she was found in the lake.

The guilty plea answers the most important question in the case: Drabick admitted responsibility for Hikmat’s death. It also leaves hanging the part that true-crime followers often fixate on, why a case that looked, from the outside, like a more deliberate killing ended in a second-degree plea instead of a first-degree verdict. The legal answer is now in the record, but the emotional damage sits where it always did, beside a public lake that covers 46,768 acres and supplies drinking water to Apex and other nearby communities.

For Hikmat’s family, the long wait that began when she vanished after Aug. 28 ended with a sentence range, not a trial. For Jordan Lake, a place built for water and recreation, the name of the woman found near Farrington Point Boat Ramp now carries the weight of a murder that was hidden, then slowly brought into the open.