Once again Shabanu Farah Pahlavi has been dealt a terrible blow. Her youngest son, Prince Ali Reza, passed away, aged only 44, at his home in Boston, Tuesday.
Reza Pahlavi spoke freely of Ali Reza’s struggle with depression. “Like millions of young Iranians, he too was deeply disturbed by all the ills fallen upon his beloved homeland, as well as carrying the burden of losing a father and a sister in his young life.’’
In June 2001 Princess Leila, youngest of the four children of the late Shah and Farah Pahlavi – in the West still better known as Farah Diba – took her life at age 31. It took the former empress years to overcome this great loss. Ali Reza too suffered, as Reza Pahlavi disclosed.
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‘’Although he struggled for years to overcome his sorrow, he finally succumbed, and during the night of the 4th of January 2011, in his Boston residence, took his own life, plunging his family and friends into great sorrow.’’
Police said they found a man dead from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound shortly after 2 a.m. Tuesday at a home in the city's South End neighborhood, AP reported. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic revolution.
He fled Iran and wandered from country to country, ill with cancer, and eventually died in Egypt in 1980. Prince Ali Reza Pahlavi was born in Tehran in 1966 and attended school there until 1979. After the overthrown of the monarchy in 1979 in Iran’s Islamic revolution, the prince attended schools in New York, Cairo and in Williamstown, Mass.
Ali Reza studied music as an undergraduate at Princeton University and ancient Iranian studies as a graduate student at Columbia University. He also did postgraduate work at Harvard University in ancient Iranian studies and philology.
In June 2001, a sister of Pahlavi's, Leila Pahlavi, was found dead in her London hotel room. A coroner ruled that her death at age 31 was the result of an overdose of barbiturates. Her mother said at the time that her daughter had been "very depressed." © GPD; with additional reporting by AP
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