Clad in a wedding dress, Sara Baluch mourns while visiting the grave of her fiance, Mohammad Sharifi. Photo / AP
Clad in a wedding dress, Sara Baluch mourns while visiting the grave of her fiance, Mohammad Sharifi. Photo / AP
On what should have been her wedding weekend, a 22-year-old US woman was instead visiting her fiance's grave after police say he was fatally shot while trying to sell a gaming system in Tennessee.
The Chattanooga Times Free Press reports Sara Baluch put on her wedding dress and a white tulle veil on Sunday. But instead of walking down the aisle, she walked up a rain-saturated hill to 24-year-old Mohammad Sharifi's gravesite in the outskirts of Nashville.
Police say Sharifi was fatally shot in an apartment complex parking lot February 19. Twenty-year-old D'Marcus White was charged in the death that happened weeks before Sharifi's wedding.
Clad in a wedding dress, Sara Baluch, centre, mourns with her father Masoud Baluch, left, and her fiance's father Mohssen Sharifi while visiting the grave of her fiance. Photo / AP
At the cemetery, family members comforted Sara, recited prayers and read from the Quran. Toward the end, Sara's mother draped a black veil over her daughter's head, exchanging it for the white wedding veil she was wearing.
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.
"We were supposed to be together," Baluch said as tears streamed down her face.
"I'm so sorry, Mohammad. I'm so sorry. So sorry.
"We were so happy," the 22-year-old said. "I want to be with him. Why do I have to wait?"
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 said.
"It was like the world was ripped from underneath me. It felt like I was falling and it wasn't stopping. I fainted.
Clad in a wedding dress, Sara Baluch, centre, mourns with her father Masoud Baluch, left, and her fiance's father Mohssen Sharifi while visiting the grave of her fiance. Photo / AP
"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.
"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," she said.
Baluch said that in the two weeks since Sharifi's passing, he's come to visit her in her dreams.
"He won't talk to me. He just comes to me and he holds me. That's all he does," she said.
Sara Baluch talks about her fiance, Mohammad Sharifi, in her dorm room on the campus of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Photo / AP
Sara Baluch holds a picture while visiting the grave of her fiance, Mohammad Sharifi. Photo / AP
"I'm happy. I'm so grateful. That's the closest thing I've been getting to holding him. But I want to ask him: 'Are you okay?'"
Sharifi managed to celebrate Baluch's birthday on February 27 because he'd already purchased her presents, including a Rolex he'd promised to get her while they were on vacation in Hawaii.
"I had no idea he kept his promise," she said. "He was so excited to give it to me. It was the hardest thing because he got them for me.
"He's not here and he's still surprising me. He's not here and he's still giving me the world!"
Baluch said Sharifi was always going the extra mile to help her and others.
