Hamed Esmaeilion remembers a normal life before the missile hit getting up in the morning, taking his daughter to the school bus and playing games at night.
Then on Jan. 8, 2020, three minutes and forty-two seconds after Ukraine International Flight PS752 lifted off from Tehran International Airport, an Iranian Revolutionary Guard anti-aircraft missile system shot it out of the sky, instantly killing the Aurora, Ont., man’s wife and daughter.
“That three minutes and forty-two seconds doesn t leave us,” said Esmaeilion a year later. “We are haunted by this. We are all haunted by this. This destroyed us.”
Of the 176 passengers on board the passenger jet who died in the crash, 138 had ties to Canada, including Port Coquitlam’s Niloofar Razzaghi, her husband Ardalan Ebnoddin-Hamidi and their 15-year-old son, Kamyar Ebnoddin-Hamidi.