Denver police gave great publicity to the case, vocally seeking public cooperation to track down the killer. They released a video of the suspected vehicle and asked the public to be on the lookout for a maroon Jeep Grand Cherokee with front end damage.
They got calls from all over Colorado and checked out various vehicles with no success. Finally, after four days, the police found the vehicle Monday night and arrested the man they believe was driving it.
Four days earlier, police said Masoud Bahramisharif was walking his bicycle across a Denver street at an intersection about 8:40 p.m. with the light in his favor.
According to eyewitnesses, the SUV came hurtling down the street at great speed, pulled around other cars stopped at the red light and drove through the red light on the wrong side of the street, striking Bahramisharif and tossing his body several feet. He was taken to a hospital where he died the next morning.
The SUV did not stop after the accident, but continued up the street with Bahramisharif’s bicycle entangled in its grill.
The bicycle was found some blocks away. It isn’t known if the bicycle eventually fell away from the SUV or if the driver stopped and pulled it off.
Bahramisharif, 24, was born in Hamadan and earned his bachelor’s degree from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. He arrived in the United States only last September to attend the University of Denver as a graduate student in engineering.
Bahramisharif’s mother arrived recently in Denver to visit her son. She will now accompany her son’s body back to Iran on the plane.
Arash Hajjam was one of Bahramisharif’s friends in Denver and had the unenviable task of breaking the news of the death to his mother. “I would like to say she’s doing okay, but I think it’s more the shock of the accident, so she was crying a lot last night,” he told Denver’s Channel 4. “He was a talented student. He was a nice person. He was admired by his colleagues and friends.”
Denver police said they had arrested Andrew Simpson, 45, and charged him with vehicular homicide and leaving the scene of an accident.
They said he did not own the SUV that killed Bahramisharif, but was the driver that night. They did not say how they learned he was the driver, but neighbors reported police were questioning people in the apartment where Simpson lived.
The police also said Simpson was cooperating, hinting that he may have admitted being the driver.
Simpson has an arrest record going back to 1993, according to the records of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. His record includes an 18-month sentence given in 2003 for possession of a controlled substance and a traffic conviction earlier this year for speeding and driving a “defective vehicle.”
In announcing the arrest, Sgt. Michael Farr of the Denver Police said of the intense 100-hour hunt for the killer, “We did this for the victim. We did this for the community.”