Police last month found the body of 35-year-old Vahid Mahanian of West Vancouver on a mountain trail.
This comes four years after Mahanian was seriously injured during a shootout at Dover Park in the Vancouver suburb of Richmond. He was among two gangs that opened fire on each other, exchanging more than 150 shots and endangering neighborhood residents.
Mahanian spent two full years recovering from his injuries and had 15 surgical operations.
His body was found last month by trail maintenance volunteers on a remote site on Cypress Mountain.
A month has now passed since the body was recovered, but Vancouver police have still not announced any cause of death.
In 1999, Mahanian was sentenced to four years in prison after being found guilty for a 1997 armed home invasion where he tied up and robbed a North Vancouver couple, alongside his then-girlfriend, a one-time extra on The X-Files. The pair invaded the house dressed in black and toting machineguns.
One of the others wounded in the 2007 shootout was gangster Nikki Tajali, whose brother, David, was gunned down and killed in Calgary in September 2009.
Mahanian’s mother, Showkat, earlier told The Van-couver Sun her son had never been in a gang but was a childhood friend of the Tajalis. She said her son and David Tajali had gone to the park that day to try to resolve a dispute they had with others.
“One of the brothers asked him to go. He went to help a negotiation,” she said. “He just got out of the car and saw there were people with guns.”
Since the shooting, Maha-nian graduated with honors from the University of British Columbia, his mother said.
He had also applied for a pardon in connection with the 1997 home invasion, which Mahanian’s mother called a foolish mistake.
She said her son had worked hard to turn his life around and had nothing to do with either Tajali brother.
Another man injured in the Dover Park shooting, Sahand Askari, moved to Iran, but returned last fall for two months, during which time he was the target of a shooting, but escaped injury.
Vancouver is the only city in North America where large numbers of Iranians are active in gang activity.
A few gangs are Iranian-run, like the Persian Knights, but Iranians are members of other gangs as well. Many gangs are ethnically integrated. But the gang appeal is chiefly to Asian immigrants, not native-born Canadians.
In one gangland killing a decade ago, the killer calmly walked down the aisle of a Vancouver movie theater, shot a young Iranian male directly in the face as he was seated watching a film with his girlfriend, then just walked out an emergency door and disappeared. No one has been charged.
