Reza Pahlavi met reporters in Boston, where Alireza died, and told them his brother had left a suicide note. He gave no information on what the note said.
As to the reason for the suicide, Reza attributed it to a long battle with depression. “We mourn today the succumbing of our beloved Alireza to the weight, pain and daily burdens of this grave illness, and because of its robbing the promise of yet another life unfulfilled,” Reza said in a reference to Leila, the youngest of the Shah’s four offspring, who committed suicide a decade ago.
Reza read from a notepad, pausing periodically to regain his composure.
Reza said he last spoke with his brother two weeks ago, but said the two exchanged text messages frequently.
He said a memorial service is being planned for Washington, DC.
Boston police said officers responding to a 911 call found Alireza dead in his home in the city’s South End neighborhood shortly after 2 a.m. Tuesday. A police spokesman said he did not know who made the call or whether it came from the house where Alireza died.
Alireza had been a student much of his life, recently studying at Harvard. But Harvard said he was not enrolled for the current term.
In Iran, the media gave minimal, but generally factual, coverage to the death. The story carried by the state news agency was the most-viewed story of the agency’s newsfile the morning after the suicide, suggesting more interest in the royal family than the regime would prefer.
Family members attributed Alireza’s depression to the family’s forced departure from Iran and to his sister’s suicide from a massive overdose of medication.
Within the expatriate community, it has been common to see Alireza’s and Leila’s depression portrayed as an understandable byproduct of forced exile. For example, Ramin Shams Molkara, a distant relative of the Pahlavis, told The Associated Press last week, “This represents the story of millions of Iranians who left their country and live with a sense of solitude everywhere in the world, often treated as foreigners.”
Many others gave similar treatment to the passing. There is no indication, however, that suicide is common with the Iranian expatriate community.
An American writer took an unusually harsh view of Alireza’s death. Stephen Kinzer, who has written a popular history of the CIA-led coup of 1953, “All the Shah’s Men,” said, “This shocking act of self-slaughter was the latest violent tragedy in the long history of a family drenched in blood—first that of the Iranians it tortured and killed, then its own. It is a drama of Shakespearean dimensions. The Shah once ruled Iran with an iron fist, but his family later paid dearly for his sins, echoing Hamlet’s judgment that royal crime ‘cannot come to good.’”
The Shah’s widow, former Empress Farah, was in Paris, where she lives part of the year, when her younger son died.