A grieving Ottawa man is speaking publicly about the loss of his mother after she was fatally stabbed in what police are investigating as a femicide in Barrhaven.

“How can you be okay? My mom just got taken away from me,” said 34-year-old Arya Farahani.

“It’s not anything that I would hope on anybody. This is literally the worst-case scenario.”

Ottawa police have charged 30-year-old Party Shah, Farahani’s younger brother, with second-degree murder and attempted murder following the attack on Ashbourne Crescent on April 23rd.

Investigators allege Shah stabbed his mother Farnaz Farahani to death and seriously injured his grandmother Nezhat Lashgari.

The allegations have not been proven in court.

In an emotional interview, the victim’s eldest son described the moment he learned what had happened.

Farahani was on his way to an appointment when he received calls from police detectives asking to speak in person. But it was a friend who shared the news, telling him to pull his car over to the side of the road. 

“Just tell me what’s going on, is my grandmother okay?” Farahani said he asked the friend.

He says she replied, “Your grandma is going to be okay, there’s an elderly lady that’s been attacked. But there was another lady in the same household that will not be okay,” Farahani said through tears.

He recalled the shock of learning his grandmother had survived the attack, while his mother had not.

“I didn’t even need to talk to them to know who did it,” he said. “There’s only one person on this planet that could have done it.”

Arya describes his younger brother as “manipulative” and suffering from multiple mental health illnesses, being diagnosed with several disorders. Farahani says he was estranged from his brother for years and that put a strain on his relationship with his mother. He said his mother never stopped trying to keep her family together.

“My mom was always wanting us to reconcile,” he said. “She always wanted us to be friends, brothers.”

He described warning his mother in the past that he feared for her safety, urging her to distance herself from her youngest son.

“I asked her many times, ‘Please distance yourself from him. He’s not safe,’” he said. “And she would say, ‘I can’t do that. That’s my son. I’ll never abandon him.’”