Heartbreaking images show a woman kneeling at her fiancé’s grave wearing her wedding dress three weeks after he was shot dead by a man he was selling an Xbox console to.
This was supposed to be the happiest weekend of 22-year-old Sara Baluch’s life, the weekend she married 24-year-old Mohammad Sharifi.
On Sunday, she slipped into her ivory chiffon wedding dress wedding dress she’d picked out to wear at the altar and headed to the cemetery where the love of her life was laid to rest outside Nashville, Tennessee.
The cloudless day at Harpeth Hills Memory Gardens was captured in intimate photographs by Chattanooga’s Times Free Press.
Baluch sobbed through her tulle veil as she knelt in the grass damp from thunderstorms the day before surrounded by loved ones who took turns reciting prayers and reading from the Quran. Baluch said as tears streamed down her face.
WE WERE SUPPOSED TO BE TOGETHER. I’M SO SORRY, MOHAMMAD. I’M SO SORRY. SO SORRY.
As they prepared to leave Baluch’s mother Sona replaced her daughter’s white wedding veil with a black one.
‘We were so happy,’ the 22-year-old said. ‘I want to be with him. Why do I have to wait?’
On February 19, Sharifi was shot and killed in the parking lot of an apartment complex in Hixson where he’d agreed to sell his Xbox One gaming system to D’Marcus White after speaking to him on Facebook Marketplace.
The 20-year-old has been charged with criminal homicide in Sharifi’s death.
Baluch was the first to arrive at the hospital after Sharifi was shot.
When she asked hospital staff for information about what room he was, she was told that her fiance wasn’t in the system.
‘I had the worst feeling,‘ she told the Times Free Press in an interview last month.
Minutes later a nurse approached Baluch and told her that Sharifi was dead.
‘She held my hand, and she said: “I’m so sorry. He was shot. He didn’t make it,”‘ Baluch recalled through tears.
IT WAS LIKE THE WORLD WAS RIPPED FROM UNDERNEATH ME. IT FELT LIKE I WAS FALLING AND IT WASN’T STOPPING. I FAINTED.WHEN I WOKE UP, I WAS LIKE: “NO. THIS IS A DREAM. WE WERE GETTING MARRIED IN TWO WEEKS. I JUST SAW HIM LAST NIGHT. I JUST SAW HIM.”‘
Nurses escorted Baluch to Sharifi’s room, where he was ‘lying there so peacefully’, she said.
She said:
IT WASN’T FAIR. I TOLD HIM: “I’M SO SORRY I COULDN’T PROTECT YOU.” HE PROTECTED ME EVERY DAY, AND I FAILED TO PROTECT HIM.
