June 16, 2017
Two years ago this month, Maryam Rashidi was killed when a man trying to steal gasoline from a service station in Canada intentionally ran over her. Last week, her husband, driving to an event marking the second anniversary of her death, was killed in a car crash on the Trans-Canada Highway.
Only their son, now eight years old, survives.
Ahmad Nourani Shallo died in a crash last Thursday while driving to a memorial event marking the second anniversary of the death of his wife, Maryam Rashidi, who was killed at age 35 trying to stop a gasoline thief.
Shallo was traveling to Calgary, where Maryam was killed, from Vancouver with his new wife and his son when the accident happened on the Trans Canada Highway near Golden, British Columbia. Shallo and their son moved to Vancouver after her death.
A family friend told CTV News the boy, Koorosh, was in the back seat sleeping and suffered only minor injuries. The second wife suffered serious injuries that required surgery. She will survive.
Koorosh is now back in Vancouver with family friends while the extended family discusses what to do next.
Rashidi was working only her fourth shift at a Calgary service station on June 7, 2015, when Joshua Mitchell, 20, tried to drive off without paying for a tank of gasoline. Rashidi chased after him and, in heavy traffic, caught up and jumped on the hood. Mitchell jolted his pickup truck, knocking Rashidi off, and then drove over her. She died two days later.
Mitchell was convicted of manslaughter last month and faces an August 30 sentencing date.
Rashidi had only been on the job for two weeks, having emigrated to Canada from Iran the previous year with her husband.
Both had engineering jobs in the oil industry before being laid off when the Alberta economy started to decline.
“Everyone is shocked. We’re all devastated. We can’t believe this,” family friend Ehsan Hosseini told the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corp.). The widower died one day less than two years after his wife.
Shallo’s parents have flown to Canada from Iran.
Gina Masnadi, a close family friend, said, “Koorosh was so attached to his dad after Maryam passed. It’s going to be hard, very hard for him. We just hope that he will be strong through these hard days.”
Masnadi said she has been working to obtain a visa for Rashidi’s mother, who lives in Iran, to come to Calgary to attend the sentencing in August.
She said the Persian community in Calgary is prepared to rally around Koorosh and the extended families to provide any assistance necessary.
“It’s not easy when you immigrate here and you don’t have anybody,” Masnadi said.
“You come with a big hope for your life, for yourself and your kid, and to end up being like this is a tragedy.”
The police haven’t released details on the crash that killed Shallo. Masnadi told the CBC, “As far as I know, [Shallo] was driving and lost control and he went into the passing lane and hit a truck.”
Rashidi and Shallo met 13 years earlier in Tehran where they both studied engineering and then worked together in the oil industry. She was a processing engineer while he was a piping engineer. A family friend said Rashidi graduated at the top of her class.
They moved to Montreal in 2014 and came to Calgary in January 2015 when they both got jobs there in the oil industry. But with the slump caused by the oil price plunge, they were both laid off in a few months.