Mohammad Ghafoorian was a wealthy architect and businessman who moved to the United States a decade after the revolution because he thought it would provide better opportunities for his children.
He died by electrocution while running with a fire extinguisher to try to put out a fire in his parked car. He was 67—the same age at which his own father died in Iran in a freak gas explosion.
Ghafoorian was at home when the freak storm erupted late on the night of June 28. The storm hits several states from the Mississippi to the Atlantic, but reserved its greatest fury for Washington, DC, and the surrounding counties in Maryland and Virginia.
Great gusts blew shingles off roofs and toppled trees into streets and onto houses. One tree near Ghafoorian’s house came crashing down on top of electrical lines, tearing the lines off their polls and dropping them on Ghaffoorian’s Maserati, which burst into flame as the live wires ignited the gasoline.
Ghafoorian saw the flames and grabbed a fire extinguisher from his home. As he rushed to his car in the dark, he stepped on one of the live wires and was killed instantly.
Ironically, Ghafoorian had had a dispute with his neighbors, insisting on cutting down many of the local trees because he said they posed a hazard. He won that argument—but the tree that felled the wires that killed him was not one he had targeted.
Ghafoorian was one of 26 people who died that night in the Washington metropolitan area as a result of the storm.
Ghafoorian’s wife, Shiva, was injured trying to save her husband and is hospitalized. Her family said doctors told them her injuries were not life-threatening.
Ghafoorian made a fortune in Iran as an architect, but felt the opportunities were limited for his two children. He brought his family to California in 1989, none of them speaking English at the time.
But he was concerned about earthquakes in California. So he picked up stakes and moved, choosing Washington in part because he thought it would be good to live near the capital, his son, Reza, told The Washington Post.
He found a large plot of land with a run-down house that had once been the Senegalese embassy. He knocked the house down and built himself a castle-like mansion.
His son said his father was volatile and commanding, but very generous. He wouldn’t back out of an argument, like the one he had over the trees. But he freely gave money to those in need. Reza said his father explained, “God has chosen to give me money so I can help other people.”
He talked at one time about possibly moving to back to Iran in his old age, but he dropped that talk after five very American grandchildren were born in the States.
Reza said his father had a strong attraction to animals, although he didn’t talk about it much. Reza said his father would find injured squirrels and birds on his property, build them small homes and then bottle- or eyedropper-feed them back to health.
Reza reflected on his dad’s life, saying, “He lived like a storm and a storm took him. I think only a storm like that could take him.”
