The Boy in the Plaid Shorts

In the summer of 2005, 17-year-old Bijan Nassirdaftari seemed to have it all—a loving family, a girlfriend who adored him, many close friends and a spot waiting for him at the University of Maryland. But when a pot deal went bad, Bijan lay murdered on a Bethesda street and the people who loved him were left to bear the unbearable

By Kathleen Wheaton

On the afternoon of July 17, 2005, the last day of his brief life, 17-year-old Bijan Nassirdaftari drove home from his summer job at Manhattan Bagel on Rockville Pike and went upstairs in his Rockville home to pack the overnight bag he planned to take to freshman orientation at the University of Maryland the next morning. He was 6-foot-2, with close-cropped black hair, long eyelashes and a wide, melting smile. In summer, he favored polo shirts and madras plaid Bermuda shorts—clothes that often denote private schools and a comfortable upbringing. Six weeks earlier, he’d graduated from Gonzaga College High School, the prestigious all-boys Jesuit high school in the District—a source of considerable pride and financial sacrifice for his parents, Maria Solaun and Saied Nassirdaftari.

Sacrifice wasn’t new to Maria and Saied. As a child in the early 1960s, Maria had fled Cuba along with her parents, bringing nothing but their clothes and a map of where the family heirlooms were buried. Saied had been sent by his family from his native Tehran to study first in Switzerland and then in the U.S.; in the wake of the 1979 Iranian revolution and the subsequent war with Iraq, his parents implored him not to return. He met Maria in the library at American University. “Her eyes were unbelievably beautiful—I thought she was Iranian,” he says. Maria, meanwhile, supposed that dark, handsome Saied was a Spaniard. They fell in love, their parallel histories a strong bond between them.

They married and bought a brick Colonial on Plantation Lane in Rockville. Saied became a software engineer and Maria, who’d begun a career in international trade, switched to freelance Spanish teaching in order to devote more time to their three children: Bijan, Alina and Laila. She ensured that they had Catholic educations (Saied, a secular Muslim, had agreed), spoke proper Spanish, and that the family sat down to home-cooked meals every night. “She’s not one of those moms who throws hot dogs in the oven, but this mother prepares quality food every night,” Bijan enthused in a Mother’s Day card in May 2003.

They were a family that readily expressed emotion and affection. “You’re such a strong woman and I’m so proud to be your son,” Bijan wrote, in a Mother’s Day letter, in 2005. “You have given so, so, so much for me. I really want you to understand how much you mean to me.”

A pair of red, white and blue Bermudas

In spring of 2005, as Bijan was getting ready to graduate from Gonzaga,  Laila and Alina, then 12 and 15, teased their brother that they were going to paint his bedroom pink and turn it into a “girls’ lounge” the minute he left for college.

Today, more than a year after he was murdered, his room is as he left it: the sea-blue walls, the neatly stacked boxes of treasured basketball shoes, the zipped overnight bag on the bed, still containing the clothes for his college orientation. A self-portrait painted in an art class at Gonzaga bears more than a passing resemblance to the studio photograph on the table downstairs in the foyer, where a beaming Bijan towers over his pretty, dark-haired sisters. All three are barefoot and dressed in casual summer outfits. Bijan wears a white polo shirt and a pair of red, white and blue plaid Bermudas.

They’re the clothes he was wearing when he died, Maria says.

The man who discovered Bijan’s body on the sidewalk on Alta Vista Road in Bethesda described the Bermuda shorts in his frantic 911 call. The crime scene investigator noted the turned-out pockets—DNA evidence collected from their cotton lining led detectives to Edward Ricardo Thomas, the 21-year-old man who shot Bijan with a 44-caliber revolver. And 19-year-old Ardele Monkkonen, who was originally charged with first-degree murder but turned state’s witness and pled guilty instead to armed robbery and accessory to murder after the fact, repeatedly referred to Bijan from the witness stand in a tearful voice as “the boy in the plaid shorts.”

Marijuana was no big deal

Bijan’s girlfriend, Aubrie St. Clair of Rockville, who’d just graduated from St. John’s College High School in Washington, was waiting for him that afternoon at the house on Plantation Lane. Since meeting Bijan at a party six months earlier, blonde, green-eyed Aubrie had become a fixture in the Nassirdaftari household—watching “The O.C.” with Laila and Alina as Bijan groaned and pretended not to watch; walking the dog, Morgan; helping with the dishes. Maria had stopped fixing company meals when Aubrie stayed for dinner.

The night before, Maria had cooked a special meal at Bijan’s request—his favorite steak and mashed potatoes. At dinner, they’d talked about the fact that Laila, who was visiting the kids’ Cuban grandparents in Florida, would be home in a couple of days and they’d be “all together” again.

That steak dinner was the last meal Bijan had with his family. It was months, Maria says, before she could peel a potato without bursting into tears.

But on the night of July 17, everyone in the family had different plans and scattered in different directions. Bijan and Aubrie hung out for a while, and then Bijan told his mother they were going out. “We won’t be long, Mami,” he said.

“I love you, Bij,” Maria said. She added, as she often did, “Be a man of God.”

Aubrie thought it was cute the way big, tall Bijan still called his mother by the Spanish endearment, “Mami.” The fact that he didn’t mind telling his mother he loved her in front of other people was one of the many things she adored about him. “He was the best, the most perfect boyfriend,” she says. “All he wanted was for me to be happy.”

“You don’t suppose they’ll get married, do you?” Maria recalls musing to a neighbor, after the couple drove away. They were awfully young to be so serious, she felt. On the other hand, they were headed to different colleges—Aubrie had won a grant to study chemistry at Villa Julie College in Baltimore. She was interested in forensics, and hoped to work at the FBI. (Six months later, as a witness at the murder trial, Aubrie wasn’t permitted to observe the court proceedings. But her aunt took notes during the coroner’s report, thinking that the information might be of particular significance or comfort to her.) 

Bijan and Aubrie headed out to meet friends near White Flint mall on Rockville Pike in Bijan’s red 1994 Volvo sedan—a safe, solid car for a teenager, Maria and Saied had believed when they bought it. They’d told Bijan in no uncertain terms that he was never to drink and drive, and, as far as they knew, he’d complied. They’d also spoken to him about the dangers of marijuana, which they’d discovered he was smoking in 10th grade—and here, they well knew, Bijan had not complied.

But Maria and Saied weren’t the kind of parents to close their eyes when they saw something they didn’t like. They lectured Bijan. They grounded him. They took away his cell phone. To his mortification, Maria called the parents of several of Bijan’s friends to ask whether they knew that their kids were smoking marijuana.

Some parents, she found out, sort of did know, and thought maybe pot wasn’t the worst thing—at least it wasn’t cocaine, or crystal meth. One or two thanked her for telling them. Still others reacted by forbidding their children to associate with Bijan, who blamed Maria for interfering. But he was a teenager with perhaps more than a little of his mother’s spirit and his father’s tenacity, and he wasn’t about to stop smoking weed just because his parents told him to.

Saied and Maria enrolled Bijan in two rehab programs, thinking that meeting serious drug addicts would frighten him. It did not. Late one night, in April 2004, Maria happened to glance out the living room window and saw that Bijan and a boy he’d met in rehab were conducting a drug transaction in the side yard. She called the police.

She couldn’t look at Bijan as the police took him away in handcuffs. The next morning, the Nassirdaftaris got a call from the police asking them to come pick him up. They drove to the station. “Get in the car,” Maria told Bijan. “You’re going to school.”

“But I’ve been awake all night,” he protested.

“You’re going to school,” Maria said.

For the next day or two, she says wryly, their relationship was “rather tense.” Then she took Bijan to find a lawyer for his upcoming drug possession hearing. When told that the legal fees would come to $3,000, Maria promptly wrote out the check. Bijan looked aghast. “He didn’t say anything,” she recalls. “But I could see from the look on his face that he understood I’d done everything I did because I loved him.”  

Although their warm bond resumed, Bijan still wouldn’t stop smoking pot. Once, at her wits’ end, she told him, “Someday, something will go wrong, and you’ll be shot.” She’d said this the way parents say that sharp sticks will put out eyes, that a bus will run over the child who doesn’t look both ways. Recalling this now, she claps her hand over her mouth, her eyes filling with horrified tears.

She remembers that Bijan gazed at her in astonishment, then burst out laughing. “Oh, Mami, don’t be crazy,” he said, enfolding her in a bear hug.

He believed he knew something that his parents didn’t—that marijuana was no big deal, that it was everywhere, at every party. Marijuana may be everywhere, but it’s also illegal, Maria points out. In order for pot to be at every party, someone has to buy it—illegally—and bring it there.

In Bijan’s circle of friends, that someone was often Bijan—a good-looking, smart, athletic, outgoing kid, who spoke fluent Spanish, who was proud of the fact that he knew how to get along with all kinds of people. “He had a lot of friends,” says Jennifer Gerhartz of Potomac, a close friend of Bijan’s who graduated from Holy Child in 2005 and is now at Rider University in New Jersey. “He was very perceptive, very aware of other people’s feelings, and he took things to heart. He took it very much to heart when anyone was mad at him.” It pains Jen that since his death Bijan has been perceived as a druggie. “Everyone was involved,” she says. “We all felt invincible—we were like, whatever, it’s no big deal.”

“Everyone liked him,” says Bill Brown, the manager of Manhattan Bagel, where Bijan worked Saturdays, Sundays and vacations. “It was a very sad day for us when he was killed,” he says, then pauses. “I think he was a little bit naive.”

One of the many people Bijan got along with was a stocky 18-year-old from Silver Spring named Mike Manaugh, who’d been expelled from two Montgomery County high schools and who’d begun dealing both drugs and stolen guns, and who in the spring of 2005 participated in an armed robbery that had gone off smoothly. Bijan had met Mike in the summer or fall of 2004 playing basketball in Farmland Park in Rockville, near Bijan’s house, and over the ensuing year had bought small amounts of pot from him. Mike was perhaps the only one of Bijan’s myriad friends whom Maria had never met, and she’s appalled to think that she sometimes urged Bijan to take his adoring sister Laila along when he went to the park, that Laila sat in the shade and watched the boy who planned the robbery that led to Bijan’s death play basketball with her brother.

What Maria and Saied didn’t know when the red Volvo drove out of sight on the evening of July 17 was that Bijan’s errand was buying pot from Mike. They didn’t know because over the past few months it had seemed that their son had turned a corner, that his impassive teenage shell was beginning to crack. “We thought, ‘we did it—he’s launched,’” Saied says.

Bijan had worked hard his senior year and gotten accepted to college. He’d met Aubrie, a cheerleader and a sweet, domestic sort of girl, who preferred staying home to going to parties and who took Bijan along to her church youth group meetings. He’d begun to acknowledge the worry he’d caused his parents. “Even when you called 911, I know it was because you cared for me so much,” he wrote, in his 2005 Mother’s Day card. “I really, really love you. I know I’ve put some serious dents and holes in our relationship, but you still seem to always love me back.”

In June 2005, Aubrie’s parents, Tom and Linda St. Clair, invited Bijan to join their family on a mission sponsored by their Methodist congregation to build low-income housing in Wyoming. Aubrie says that Bijan became close to her father on that trip.

One evening in Wyoming, Aubrie says, Bijan began to cry and said that he knew he’d messed up some things in high school. “He had doubts about the way he’d been,” she says. When he came home, Maria says, he was the happiest she’d ever seen him. She says now that she’s glad that he experienced romantic love in the last few months of his life.

Neither the Nassirdaftaris nor the St. Clairs had any idea that Aubrie occasionally smoked marijuana. “Parents can only do so much, especially your senior year of high school,” Aubrie says now. “It was our last summer before college and we wanted it to be the best summer of our lives. What were we thinking? We weren’t thinking about consequences.”

The perfect target

Bijan and Aubrie weren’t the only ones among their friends who thought it might be fun to get high in the summer of 2005. On the afternoon of July 17, Bijan called Mike Manaugh to see whether it would be possible to buy as much as a pound of marijuana. Mike said he thought so, and that the price would be $3,000. (During the trial in which Mike also agreed to testify for the prosecution in exchange for not being charged with first-degree murder, he stated that Bijan told him he had a lot of friends who were interested in going in on the pot, and that he believed it would be no problem to collect that much money.)

But Mike later testified that he had no intention of selling a pound of marijuana to Bijan. He’d learned earlier that spring that robbery was easier and more profitable than dealing drugs, if you chose the right target. And Bijan seemed like the perfect target: a suburban, preppy kid who was unlikely to call the police or even tell his parents if he was robbed of drug money. From their times playing basketball together, Mike figured Bijan didn’t own or even know anything about guns.  

Mike called Ricardo Thomas, a friend with whom he’d conducted the earlier, successful robbery, and to whom he’d sold a stolen 44-caliber silver-colored revolver with a rubber grip and a night scope at a $400 profit. Ricardo had commented to Mike that he wanted to buy a dirt bike to replace one that had been stolen, and now Mike said he knew how money for a new bike could be obtained. “I know someone we can rob,” he told Ricardo. “It should be pretty easy.”

It may have been that Mike understood that Bijan, while naive, wasn’t foolhardy, because he realized that a couple of steps needed to be taken for the robbery to go smoothly. The first was to go to his closet in the Silver Spring condo where he lived with his mother and select a blue button-down shirt for Ricardo to wear. During the murder trial, Mike admitted that he selected the shirt so that Bijan wouldn’t be uneasy around Ricardo.

Wearing the shirt, Mike reasoned, 21-year-old Ricardo Thomas would look less like what he was: a young man whose father was in jail and who’d been in and out of juvenile detention centers since the age of 10, and whose mother stole his clothes to pay for her crack habit. In a blue button-down, Mike figured, Ricardo might look instead like he came from a household where decent shirts were regularly washed and ironed—someone Bijan could trust.

The second step to ensuring the success of the robbery was to persuade Ricardo’s girlfriend, Ardele Monkkonen, to accompany them.

Ardele, whose wide blue eyes and round face made her appear even younger than 19, had met Ricardo in the summer before her senior year at Thornton Friends School in Alexandria. As a child, Ardele had sold lemonade to raise money for the Humane Society and insisted that her mother cut plastic soda holders apart to prevent seagulls from being strangled by them. As a teenager, however, the principal at Thornton Friends observed in Ardele a tendency to form friendships “with persons of dangerous and questionable background in an admirable but unrealistic attempt to help them.”

In an interview with a psychologist in the months after her arrest, Ardele said that at first she thought Ricardo was “not too smart, quiet, strange, nice...he could be charming.” Once, soon after they began seeing each other, she gave him a playful push. He retaliated by punching her in the stomach. Then he disappeared from her life.

He resurfaced several months later on the doorstep of her parents’ house on Harvard Street in Adams Morgan. He said he’d escaped from a juvenile facility in Minnesota. He was recovering from a gunshot wound. “We became friends again,” Ardele told the psychologist. “I forgot about the punch.” 

Ricardo asked Ardele’s parents, Gayle Monkkonen and Robert Corcoran, if he could keep his things in their basement because his mother was stealing them. Robert, an architect, helped get Ricardo a Social Security number and a job answering phones at his firm. Ricardo gradually became a fixture at the Monkkonen-Corcoran home, where Gayle and Robert initially judged him to be polite and agreeable. In the spring of 2004, Ardele graduated from high school and prepared to go to Hood College in Frederick to study horticulture. Ricardo told her that that he would go with her if she waited for him to finish his one-year probation, under which he couldn’t leave the District. “Me, being the gullible stupid person that I am, made the biggest mistake of my life,” Ardele said to the psychologist. She applied for a year’s deferment. When she turned 18, her parents paid for her rent in an apartment around the corner from their house, and Ricardo moved in with her.

But the relationship began to go badly wrong. Ardele told the psychologist that Ricardo hit, punched and kicked her, sometimes to the point of unconsciousness. Her co-workers at the ice cream parlor where she worked saw Ricardo hit her in the face outside the shop, but when her employer asked Ardele about it, she abruptly quit her job. A close friend of Ardele’s asked why she put up with Ricardo’s treatment. The friend said she replied, “Because he loves me.”

In late fall 2004, Ricardo, who’d stopped working at Ardele’s father’s firm, had told Ardele that he wanted money to buy a gun. If she didn’t give it to him, she said he told her, she’d be responsible for whatever he did to obtain it. Ardele had gotten a job in the floral department of Whole Foods in Tenleytown, though her parents helped her whenever she came up short for rent and other expenses. Ardele went to an ATM, withdrew $500, and gave it to Ricardo. She then accompanied him to buy a gun from Mike Manaugh, whom she knew through a mutual friend who’d also attended Thornton Friends. Ricardo asked Ardele for a gun manual for Christmas and she bought him one, using a Barnes & Noble gift card.  

On the evening of July 17, 2005, Mike and Ricardo picked Ardele up from Whole Foods, saying that they were on their way to buy some marijuana. Ardele, who’d been present at the armed robbery that spring, said she began to feel uneasy as Mike drove up Wisconsin Avenue to the Grosvenor Metro stop in Rockville. When the car stopped in the parking lot, she got out and called her mother on her cell phone to ask her to pick her up, but her mother said she wasn’t feeling well and couldn’t come. After Ardele hung up, she saw that Ricardo, who’d been riding in the front passenger seat of Mike’s car, had moved to the back seat. She also noticed that he’d buttoned a blue shirt on top of his oversized “Michael Vick” Atlanta Falcons jersey. She later said that those two changes made her even more uneasy. But she seemed to be at a point where she felt incapable of questioning or objecting to very much. Mike honked the horn, and she got into the front seat.

‘It’s OK, I trust these guys’

Since leaving the Nassirdaftari house, Bijan and Aubrie had spent the earlier part of the evening driving around. Bijan had telephoned Mike several times. They’d picked up Bijan’s two best friends from Gonzaga, Derek Vanbrakel of Silver Spring and Andrew Hayes of Chevy Chase. The four of them had smoked some marijuana. They’d listened to music and gone to the 7-Eleven across from White Flint mall. They’d switched from Bijan’s Volvo to Derek’s red Honda Accord and gone to an ATM so that Derek could withdraw $700 to add to the pile of money Bijan had collected for several friends who wanted to go in on the weed.

Aubrie, sitting in the back seat of Derek’s Accord with Bijan, asked him to let her hold the pile of money. She couldn’t really explain why: “I just wanted to hold it,” she said later. She held the money and then handed it back to Bijan. When they arrived at the Grosvenor Metro she watched him get into the teal-green Intrepid driven by Mike, whom she’d never met. In the back seat of the Intrepid, next to Bijan, Aubrie saw another young man she didn’t know, with unkempt cornrows and a blue button-down shirt. In the front seat she saw a girl with long, red hair, who did not turn around. But Aubrie says that the mere sight of a girl in the other car was reassuring to her.

With Derek following him, Mike began driving back down Rockville Pike toward Bethesda. He turned right onto Alta Vista Road, into the Maplewood neighborhood, where the quiet streets are lined with arching silver maples and Bradford pears. Mike then turned right onto the semicircular Alta Vista Terrace. He’d once dated a girl who lived in the area, and he knew his way around the maze of winding streets and cul-de-sacs. Derek followed the Intrepid, and stopped his car when Mike did.

Mike told Bijan that more money would be needed to complete the deal. He told Bijan that the man from whom they’d be buying marijuana was paranoid about having too many people around, and that Bijan’s friends shouldn’t follow them any further. He did not tell Bijan that, parked a few blocks away in the shadows of Maplewood Park, a friend of his named Max was waiting. If, Mike had reasoned, Bijan did end up calling the police after the robbery, the stolen money could be handed off to Max, and Mike’s car would have nothing in it when the cops stopped him.

Bijan walked back to Derek’s car, and said he needed $200 more. Derek gave it to him. Bijan told his friends that Mike had asked them not to follow them any further. “Do you want someone to go with you?” Derek asked him.

“It’s OK,” Bijan said. “I trust these guys.” 

Those were the last words Derek, Andrew and Aubrie heard Bijan say. They watched Bijan walk back toward the Intrepid and get inside. The car moved forward along Alta Vista Terrace. Derek turned his car around.

While Bijan was out of the car getting the money, Ardele heard Mike ask Ricardo if he had “that thing.” That, she testified, was the moment when she knew that there was no marijuana deal; that Mike and Ricardo intended to rob the boy in the plaid shorts.

She remembered noticing that Bijan had a cigarette in his hand as he walked to the Intrepid. Bijan got back into the car, and a scuffle began in the back seat. She remembered that the automatic door locks kept clicking up and down, that Mike, beside her in the driver’s seat, kept repeating to Bijan, “Just give him the money, man. Just give him the money.”

When asked by prosecutors why she didn’t, at that point, jump out of the car and run for help, Ardele said that she was too scared to move, and that she had no idea where she was. Finally, however, she summoned the courage to turn around. In the back seat of the car, she saw Ricardo and Bijan locked in a desperate struggle. She saw Bijan’s little finger hooked inside Ricardo’s mouth. She saw the silver-colored revolver she’d paid for a few months earlier pointed at her with Ricardo’s finger on the trigger. She ducked down in her seat and began to cry. She heard the passenger door of the car swing back on its hinges, feet hitting pavement, a gunshot.

Ricardo returned to the car, breathing hard. Ardele remembered Mike shouting “Did you shoot him? Did you fucking shoot him?” as he sped away.  

“I don’t know,” Ricardo said.

Ardele testified that Mike asked Ricardo if he’d gotten any money.   

“It must have been in his sock,” Ricardo said—though in fact, the money had been in Bijan’s left pocket. DNA evidence showed that Ricardo dug into the pocket and took the wad of cash after Bijan fell dead on the sidewalk.

Mike told Ardele to call his friend Max, who was still parked under the trees in Maplewood Park, and tell him that he didn’t need to wait anymore. After she made that call, Ardele testified, Mike remembered that Bijan also had a cell phone that would contain records of their calls back and forth. He told Ricardo and Ardele that if he went down, they were going with them. He dropped them in D.C. at Ardele’s apartment and drove away. Ricardo told Ardele that he needed to come upstairs and brush his teeth because Bijan’s skin was in his mouth. She testified that he told her that if she breathed a word of what had happened to anyone, he would kill both her and her parents.  

Aubrie, riding in Derek’s car, also heard the gunshot as Derek came to a stop at the corner of Alta Vista Terrace and Alta Vista Road. Derek and Andrew, who were arguing over the radio, told Aubrie no, it must have been a firecracker. But she jumped out of the car. Up ahead, just past the second intersection of Alta Vista Road and Alta Vista Terrace, she saw Bijan standing on the sidewalk. She saw him take one step and fall to the ground. She saw the taillights of the Intrepid as it raced away in the darkness. She began to scream. The boys, still bent over the radio, testified that they saw neither the shooting nor the subsequent robbery, but, alarmed by Aubrie’s panic, they shouted to her to get back in the car.

Derek pulled up near to where Bijan’s body lay face up on the sidewalk. He was already dead, blood pooling from the wound in his temple. The pockets of his shorts were turned out.

Derek and Andrew stood on the grass and gazed in shock at Bijan. A resident of Alta Vista Terrace who’d also heard the gunshot and called 911 asked them what had just happened, but the boys didn’t answer. Aubrie fell to her knees in the middle of street, screaming. The resident urged Aubrie to get up and out of the street. When the ambulances came, one of them took Aubrie to the hospital. Then, after her parents arrived and she was calmer, a detective escorted her to the Bethesda police station, where Derek and Andrew were already being questioned.

During the trial, Derek, Andrew and Aubrie all admitted that at first they hadn’t told the police what they were doing on Alta Vista Road at 11 that night—that they’d been smoking marijuana and were intending to buy more. The reason, they each admitted in shamed, almost inaudible voices, was that they hadn’t wanted to get in trouble. Still thinking like teenagers who’d gone to good schools and gotten good grades and were headed to good colleges, they hadn’t wanted to get their friend, who was dead, in trouble.

Telling a mother her son had been shot

At 1:15 a.m., Maria woke up and realized that Bijan hadn’t come home yet. She called his cell phone and got no answer. She woke Saied. Then she telephoned Derek’s family. Derek’s sister answered, sounding, to Maria’s increasing alarm, quite awake. “You don’t know?” she said to Maria. “Bijan’s had an accident. Stay off the phone and someone will call you.”  

Maria called every hospital in the D.C. area, but no emergency room held anyone who fit Bijan’s description. She finally called the police, who told her that she would be contacted shortly. She and Saied sat in the living room, paralyzed. An hour or two passed. At last they saw a policeman coming up the front walk, and Maria ran out to the street. “I have three children, and you may not come in if you’re here to tell me differently,” she said. “He’s not dead. He’s going to be home in a little bit.” 

Later, she says, she learned that one reason the police took so long to arrive was that they, too, had felt momentarily paralyzed—telling a mother her son had been shot wasn’t routine in Bethesda. The police sergeant who’d agreed to tell Maria and Saied that Bijan had been murdered was a graduate of Gonzaga. As he spoke, his eyes filled with tears.

At dawn, Maria drove by herself to the parking lot of St. Jane Frances de Chantal in Bethesda, the church the family attended as well as the Catholic primary school Bijan and his sisters had gone to. She prayed to the Virgin Mary to bring her son home. When she returned to Plantation Lane, the sun was up and TV camera crews had sprouted on the lawn. She woke Alina and she called her parents in Florida. They flew to Washington with Laila, who’d been told that her brother had been hurt in a car accident. Friends more experienced in grief than Maria came over with cases of bottled water, toilet paper and Kleenex. Laila walked in and asked her parents if they were giving a party. When Maria told her the truth, her cries echoed through the house.

Later that morning, July 18, a Mass was said for Bijan at de Chantal. The news had traveled quickly, and the church was full. Afterward, several de Chantal mothers accompanied Maria to the intersection of Alta Vista Terrace and Alta Vista Road. She bent over and touched the ground where her son had lain, “but I still didn’t really believe it,” she says. But then there were body parts to donate; a wake and a funeral Mass to plan. The next afternoon, as Maria and Saied were picking out Bijan’s casket, they received the news that three murder suspects had been arrested.

In court, Mike Manaugh said that after he dropped off Ricardo and Ardele he went to a friend’s apartment and threw up. He smoked some pot but couldn’t eat or sleep. At one point, Ricardo stopped by and offered him a portion of the stolen money, but Mike told him he didn’t want it. After Ricardo left, Mike called Ardele and asked to see her. He was worried about the call log on Bijan’s cell phone—now, he was certain, in the hands of the police. Mike and Ardele met and agreed that whatever story they came up with could not include Ricardo. They decided to blame Bijan’s murder on an invented “Jeffrey.” Mike then went home to Silver Spring. He told his mother that he was in a lot of trouble and needed a lawyer. Mike and his mother had just pulled into the parking lot of the lawyer’s office in Rockville when he was arrested.

Soon after Ardele returned to her apartment following her meeting with Mike, Ricardo showed up and said he needed to take a shower. While he was in the bathroom, Ardele searched the pockets of his blue jeans and found a $1,000 receipt for a motorbike and helmet. When Ricardo came out of the bathroom he gave her the rest of the stolen money and told her to hide it at her parents’ house. According to her testimony, he repeated his threat to kill her and her parents if she disobeyed. Ardele put the pile of cash that Aubrie had held a day earlier—now $1,000 thinner—into a pocketbook and hid it under the bed in her childhood room. She was arrested on Rock Creek Parkway the next morning, as her mother was driving her to her job at Whole Foods.

Under police questioning, Mike slipped up almost immediately, saying “Ricardo” instead of “Jeffrey.” Ardele, too, quickly capitulated and agreed to testify against Ricardo, whom the police found asleep in her bed when he was arrested. When Ricardo learned that Ardele intended to testify for the prosecution, he wrote her a 10-page letter on the back of court documents, threatening, among other things, to “bash [Ardele’s] head into the floor.” He wrote that he did not have to be personally free from jail in order to have her and her parents killed.  

On March 2, 2006, Edward Ricardo Thomas was found guilty of first-degree murder. In June, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. “I believe there are very few evil people in this world, but I believe that you are one of them,” the Montgomery County Circuit Court judge, Nelson Rupp Jr., told Thomas. In April 2006, Ardele Monkkonen received a sentence of 18 months for armed robbery and accessory to murder after the fact. Mike Manaugh, who faces those same charges as well as the charge of having planned the robbery, faces a possible 20 years in prison. (He was due to be sentenced in mid-August.) 

Bearing the unbearable

For the Nassirdaftaris, the year following their son’s death was filled with painful and disorienting milestones: the wake, the funeral, the burial, a memorial Mass at Gonzaga, the ordering and placing of a headstone, the murder trial. Each event set Bijan’s life further into the past. Parents accustomed to looking forward, guiding and anticipating, suddenly realized that it was only by looking backward that they could they still see Bijan. 

The 17th of every month brought a fresh reminder of what had happened. The prayer with which they’d always begun their meals—God is great, God is good—stuck in their throats. Unable to bear the sight of an empty chair at the table, Bijan’s place became piled with the manila envelopes, legal documents and newspaper clippings that now represented him. The dining room table was given over to condolence letters, cards and photographs—of Bijan as a toddler or a young boy with a heavy fringe of black hair and an impish grin. On holidays, the Nassirdaftaris ate in restaurants. Improvisation, in contrast to their once-orderly family rituals, seemed the only way to get by.

Maria says that with Bijan’s death she crossed a line into a world known only to parents who’ve lost a child. “We’re put on this earth to protect our children, and to fail at that is almost embarrassing. People see me at Giant and try to say the right words. There are no right words. Others I see avoiding me, as if what I have is contagious.”

She worries about the cloud Bijan’s death will cast over Alina’s and Laila’s teenage years. “They’ve been through so much. They need the regular mom they had before, to take them to the mall, to soccer games. Sometimes I break down at dinner. Mostly, I grieve alone.” She goes frequently to the spot on Alta Vista Road where Bijan was killed, and to the cemetery in Germantown where he’s buried—a place that’s difficult for the rest of the family to visit. Recently, when she bought a new car, she drove it to her son’s grave and talked about it, thinking about how much he’d have liked discussing the purchase with her.

She says she doesn’t yet feel Bijan’s presence, but wishes she could. She wonders whether she’ll be able to find him in heaven. Once, a few months ago, she was upstairs and heard a voice call, “Mami!” but neither of her daughters, who’d also heard the voice, said they’d called her. “It was Bijan, Mami!” Laila said, delightedly.

Maria says she sometimes has the sensation of being at the bottom of a well, climbing a ladder toward a circle of blue sky. But then something happens that sends her sliding down the rungs to the bottom. One backward blow was the day she went to Alta Vista Road and found that the memorial to Bijan, including a silver Celtic cross, letters and photographs, had been removed without a trace. Another was a letter Aubrie and Derek wrote her, saying that the two of them had begun dating. It brought home the fact that the other kids from that night could and would move on with their lives.

Of her relationship with Derek, Aubrie says, “Nobody other than Derek could understand what Bijan was for me. I needed to be with someone who understands and can relate. He told me, ‘I know you love Bijan and you always will. I’m not trying to take that away from you.’ With another guy,” Aubrie says, “I might lose Bijan.”

Her first year at college, she says, was difficult. Often she couldn’t eat or sleep. Her grades were so poor that she lost her grant. She found it hard to relate to other freshmen, to their eagerness to party. In addition to a collage of photos of Bijan on the wall of her room, she put a newspaper clipping from the murder on her door, just above the refrigerator. “That way,” she says, “my roommates have to look at that picture before they get into the fridge for a beer.”

At the Mass held for Bijan at Gonzaga a month after his death, Maria embraced each of his friends and urged them to stay away from drugs. She told them she wasn’t angry at them for their part in the marijuana deal.

“In my 36 years as a counselor, [Bijan’s death] was the most heartbreaking that I’ve ever had to deal with,” says Bill Wilson, who was his counselor at Gonzaga. “It’s had a profound effect on this community. But with young people, there’s this built-in forgetter. They lose sight of the pain they felt. I’d be naive to think that because of Bijan all our kids have changed and stopped going to parties.” 

Another setback for the Nassirdaftaris was the sentencing of Ardele Monkkonen in April. Taking into account both her age and her cooperation with the prosecution, the judge included in her 18-month sentence the nine months she’d already served in the Montgomery Country Detention Center. Maria felt the light sentence cheapened her son’s life—as if, once again, she’d failed him. “We asked for just the minimum—three years,” Maria says. “I hope the girl can eventually turn her life around. But there also needs to be a message that people are accountable for their actions. Ardele bought the gun, and she sat there as my son fought for his life.”

She says she thinks a great deal about how to turn her loss into a force for good. When she sees parents with small children, she says, she wants to urge them to savor each moment. “Don’t worry about shoes tracking dirt on the floor,” she says. “Love much, laugh loud, forgive quickly.”

The family set up a scholarship fund in Bijan’s name for a graduating eighth-grader of de Chantal. Last May, Maria participated in a panel organized by Bill Cosby for parents who’d lost children to violence. She’s considered starting some kind of local parents’ support group. “But it’s difficult for people to talk about struggles they have with their kids,” she says. “Nobody wants to admit publicly that things aren’t perfect.”

On a balmy summer night nearly a year after his death, the Nassirdaftaris are sitting on the patio, reminiscing about Bijan. Laila brings out a giant stuffed dog her brother bought her at a yard sale, and Maria laughs as she tells how he drove it home with its head sticking out the sunroof. She says she can see the relief in her friends’ faces whenever she laughs, when they see her wearing a nice outfit. “‘Oh, Maria,’ they ask me, ‘Are you over it?’” She shakes her head. “There is no ‘over it.’ My sentence is life.”  

She says several friends advised her to take time off from teaching after Bijan’s death. When she walked into her Spanish classroom at Our Lady of Lourdes school in Bethesda in September 2005, less than two months after the murder, she wondered if that wasn’t, after all, correct advice. She struggled to maintain her composure. She turned to face her students, and saw that they, too, had tears streaming down their cheeks. Recently, the parents of an eighth-grade boy in that class wrote her a letter. “Certainly you didn’t come to Lourdes to teach bravery,” it said. “But that is what you have done.”  

Bethesda writer Kathleen Wheaton has written for the New York Times, the San Francisco Examiner, Town & Country, Smithsonian and other publications.