MOHAMAD MEHDI SADEGHI, BAHAREH HAJESFANDIARI AND THEIR DAUGHTER, ANISA

Mohammad Mehdi Sadeghi had enrolled his 10- year- old daughter Anisa in skating lessons, which she loved, and he planned to go to a Winnipeg Jets game. He and his wife, Bahareh Hajesfandiari, went swimming together at the neighbourhood pool, something the couple, both civil engineers, could never do together in public in Iran. The family also took long bike rides through Winnipeg’s parks.

“They worked like crazy,” saving up enough money to buy a home in a nice part of town a year ago, said Murray Oliver, a family friend. “It’s kind of haunting, because I guess that home is just sitting empty right now.”

Sadeghi was serious, focused, earnest and a hard worker “really wanting to make a new life here,” Oliver said, while Hajesfandiari was lighthearted and warm with a “huge, wonderful toothy smile, a ray of light to everyone.” Anisa, he added, was a shy, sweet child.

“They were just the classic immigrant success story. They wanted to come to Canada to give a better life to their child and give her the freedom that she wouldn’t have in her home country,” said Oliver, a journalism instructor at Assiniboine Community College. “Last night, I was just looking at the spot where Mehdi and I were playing backgammon a few months ago,”

The family came to Winnipeg in 2016 and the couple was working for engineering companies. Sadeghi was helping to build a school, while driving north to help rebuild the Lake St. Martin First Nation reserve, wiped out by floodwaters in 2011.