IRVINE, Calif – Women dressed in black lit candles arranged in the numerals “176,” the number of passengers who died on the Ukrainian airplane mistakenly struck down by Iran last week, on campus at the University of California Irvine.
Hadi Khodabandeh, a second-year doctoral student in computer science, watched the flames flicker outside the humanities building. He lost two friends in the crash, Arash Pourzarabi and Pouneh Gourji, former students at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, where he got his bachelor’s degree. The couple, studying in Canada, went to Iran for their wedding. The airplane was headed for Kyiv with a connecting flight to Toronto.
He still has his last message to Pourzarabi on his phone.
“I texted him, ‘Are you ok?’” Khodabandeh said. “He never responded back.”
On Monday night, Khodabandeh attended a gathering for Iranian and Iranian American faculty, students and staff held by the school’s Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies & Culture. Over 120 people crowded into the lecture hall, many standing on the sides and in the back, before spilling outside to light candles.
There, faculty and administrators spoke about the toll recent events in Iran have taken on students.
Many Iranian Americans worry for their families amidst tensions between the United States and Iran – escalated by the targeted killing of Iran’s Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani – and unrest over the Iranian military’s delay in taking responsibility for the Ukrainian airplane crash.
