Mohammadreza Shahsavari was a second-grade student.
His mother says:
“Mohammadreza was eight years old. He was our second child. He understood so much; we used to say he understood more than his age.
He wanted to become a footballer. On the day of the crime, he had his football clothes with him.”
She says that three days before his martyrdom, they had returned from visiting the shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad.
“In Mashhad, he told me, ‘I want to have the Leader’s necklace.’ We searched everywhere but could not find one. Then he said, ‘If we cannot find it, buy me prayer beads instead.’ So we bought prayer beads and blessed them at the shrine. Those prayer beads are the last keepsake I have from Mohammadreza.
The day before his martyrdom, he asked us to take him to the seaside. We took him to the seaside. When we came back, he was tired. He asked us to wake him up for suhoor, and then as he was tired, he went to sleep early.
After he ate suhoor, he wrote his homework. He wrote: ‘I love heaven.’
I was surprised. I said, ‘My child, what kind of sentence is this?’ He said, ‘Well, I love it.’”
Mohammadreza went to school. At 11:08, the school called and told the family to come and take him home. They were on their way when the missile struck the school.
“At the school, everything was terrifying,” his mother says. “Flames of fire…”
They could find no sign of Mohammadreza at the school.
The next day, when they had almost lost hope, they found Mohammadreza at two o’clock in the afternoon.
What remains from Mohammadreza is a child’s dream of football, a set of prayer beads blessed at Imam Reza’s shrine, and a sentence written before the final morning: “I love heaven.” No one knew that, only hours later, the child who wrote it would be taken from his classroom toward the very heaven he had named.