Negar Borghei was travelling back home to Canada with her husband Alvand Sadeghi, his sister Sahand Sadeghi and her young niece Sofie Emami who all perished in the crash.
Her brother dropped them off at the airport and says the family rushed back to the scene of the plane crash as soon as they heard about the accident on Wednesday.
“She wasn’t just my sister, she was my best friend,” said Hamidreza Borghei in a Skype interview from his home in Tehran. “She taught me everything in middle school when I had issues with math and physics. She would help me because she was so good at it.
“When I hit puberty and I started dating, she gave me relationship advice and, you know, she made me the man who I am right now.”
The McGill University student’s brother says their mother is having a hard time accepting her daughter’s death.
“It’s like the moment I woke them up in their bed and told them that her plane has crashed. She just let out this scream of pain.” he said.
Borghei’s brother was very close with her little niece Sofie and cherished the time they spent together over the holidays.
“She was so smart. A couple of days before the flight, she came to me and she said, Uncle Will, let’s make a menu, I want to make a restaurant,” he said. “So we compiled a list of all the food that she likes. And it was just filled with Canadian food like poutine and like other desserts.”
The family agreed to speak out in the hopes of keeping their loved one’s memory alive.
Amirhossein Maleki, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and Borghei’s cousin, said she was commuting back and forth from Toronto to Montreal for her master’s degree in nutrition science at McGill.
“It’s a very tough situation,” he said “Her mother does not accept her death and they can’t have a funeral right now because they are still investigating.”
McGill has confirmed a student and two alumni died in the plane crash, which killed everyone on board, but did not release their identities.
“I am saddened to report that a McGill student died in the tragedy,” principal and vice-chancellor Suzanne Fortier said in a statement.
“The information available so far indicates that two McGill alumni were also killed in the crash. Out of respect for the privacy of the families, McGill will not be releasing any further details about the deceased at this time.”
Borghei had already received a master’s degree in Iran. Maleki believes she was seeking a second degree in order to obtain better employment.