Realtor Mehrad Kabir had parked his car on the 200 block of West Sixth Street before 5 p.m. on Sunday, May 3. He noticed a man on the street wearing a medical mask and looking at him in a “weird” way, but Kabir was more focussed on finishing his phone call with a friend.

When he stepped out of the car a few minutes later, the man in the mask was still there.

“And when I turned back, I saw that same guy behind me,” he said. “And at that point, he sprayed directly into my eyes.”

The pain was unlike anything he’d ever felt, Kabir said.

“I was totally blind,” he said. “My head, my eyes, my mouth were burning to hell.”

Fearful that another more serious attack was coming, Kabir was able to get back into his car and close the door.

The suspect fled.

It wasn’t until a few minutes later that Kabir got out and called for help. A neighbor rushed to his aide and called 911.

North Vancouver RCMP members arrived soon after, but unfortunately BC Ambulance Service paramedics were tied up with other calls, and after half an hour the neighbor offered to take Kabir to Lions Gate Hospital. There, he was quickly taken to an eyewash station and given baby shampoo to start washing the chemical irritants away. For a time, the treatment felt worse than the attack, he said. More than a week later, he becomes emotional recalling it.

"Oh, I cannot imagine that pain,” he said. “[It] was impossible. It was unimaginable.”

It took about four hours before Kabir could open his eyes and see properly again. He still has numbness in one of his hands. He now finds himself nervous that strangers on the street are looking at him or following him. He wakes up from nightmares about being attacked again. His car remains contaminated with pepper spray and is unusable.

“It’s a very tough situation,” he said.

Kabir said he has no idea who his attacker was. He worries that the pepper spraying might have been in retaliation for his political activism, being a regular speaker at protests calling for reform or regime change in his native Iran.

The suspect had a darker skin tone, he said. At the time, he was wearing a brown hooded jacket, khaki pants, a black baseball cap and a backpack.

Kabir is speaking out about the assault to alert the rest of the community to a dangerous suspect walking the streets. And he is sharing his dashcam footage in hopes that someone will recognize his attacker and come forward to police.

Since the attack, North Vancouver RCMP have been working through various steps of their investigation, said spokesperson Cpl. Mansoor Sahak, including canvassing the area for surveillance footage that shows the suspect’s movements.

“If anybody, as always, has any information on the suspect or about this incident, they’re asked to call the police,” he said.

Without speaking with the attacker, they don’t know what the motive might have been, Sahak added.

“There’s nothing that leads us to believe that this was targeted because there was very minimal interaction between the two,” he said. “At this point, we’re led to believe that this incident was random.”