Man guilty in fatal hit-run gets 11 years
CALGARY • The brother of a woman killed in a gas and dash says he is haunted by thoughts of his sister’s final moments when she was lying on the ground “like a rag doll.”
“I did not live any single day without thinking and experiencing flashbacks of what scenarios happened to my sister in that crime incident,” Mohamad Rashidi wrote in a victim impact statement read in court Wednesday as his mother wept quietly.
“I don’t know what you may feel when you read that your loved one’s been run over by a vehicle and left on the ground look( ing) like a rag doll.
“It set fire on Maryam’s mother’s heart.”
Maryam Rashidi, who was 35, died two years ago while trying to stop Joshua Cody Mitchell, 22, from driving off without paying for $113 in fuel he had taken from the gas station where she worked.
The trial heard that Rashidi chased the truck across a parking lot and onto the busy Trans- Canada Highway where the vehicle got stuck in traffic. She banged on the passenger window, stood in front of the truck with her hands up and then scrambled onto the hood.
She was run over after the truck swerved and she fell off.
On Wednesday, Mitchell was jailed for 11 years. He had been convicted by a jury of manslaughter, hit and run and theft.
“There was no intent to kill here,” Justice Alan Macleod said. “There was no intent to seriously injure, but the risks were patently obvious.”
Macleod also gave Mitchell a lifetime driving ban.
Rashidi’s brother and her mother, Kobra Mohammadi, flew to Calgary from Iran to attend Mitchell’s sentencing hearing.
“The crime committed against my sister ... has hurt me and my family in so many ways that I don’t know where to begin,” Rashidi wrote.
“Maryam was a genius girl who studied chemical engineering in the most top-rated university of Iran. She was so kind and did not hurt even a tiny creature during her life.
“Now she is far, far away from us.”
Another statement was written by her husband before he died in a traffic accident in June.
“Some things that you lose you recover over time. Other losses are immeasurable and can never be retrieved. For instance, the loss of innocence of a child whose mother was taken from him,” Ahmad Nourani Shallo wrote before his death.