This episode contains descriptions of graphic violence, an extramarital affair, and intimate images that were shared without a person's consent. Some of it is hard to hear. If any of that is too much for you today, please take care of yourself, and feel free to skip this one.

INTRO

Picture it. It's just after 6 o'clock on a Monday evening in June, on a stretch of First Avenue in Burnaby, British Columbia, a few blocks from the Vancouver border. Small businesses. Parked cars. People heading home from work.

A man is sitting in his car, waiting for a woman he's been seeing for months. He thinks he's about to have a conversation about some photos.

He has no idea that 2 people are walking toward his car right now, and that both of them have kitchen knives hidden in their sleeves.

Before that evening is over, he'll be dead on the pavement, and a bystander will watch a man kneel over the body, whisper something in the victim's ear, and stab him twice more.

I'm your host, Ryan Dell. This is Canadian CrimeCast: Coast to Coast True Crime.

Today's story is about an affair, a set of stolen intimate photos, and a fake Instagram account built to humiliate a woman in front of her own family. It's about a husband who decided the way to fix that was with a knife. And it's about a jury that looked at 35 stab wounds and a body left face down on a curb, and still couldn't agree it was murder. Today we're also going to spend some real time on why that word, manslaughter, ended up being the one that fit, because it trips up almost everyone who follows a case like this.

This is the case of Riza Jafari.

CHAPTER 1: THE CALL

June 17, 2024. A Monday evening.

At around 6:15 pm, Burnaby RCMP got a report of a stabbing in the 3800 block of First Avenue, near Ingleton Avenue, just east of the Vancouver boundary. Officers arrived to find a man unconscious on the pavement with life-threatening injuries. Paramedics tried to save him. It didn't work. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

His name was Fred Sangan. He was 40 years old.

Police taped off the block. The Integrated Homicide Investigation Team, IHIT, took over almost immediately, which is standard procedure for a suspicious death in the Lower Mainland.

IHIT put out the usual public appeal. They wanted to hear from anyone in the area between 5:30 pm and 6:30 pm that evening. Anyone with dashcam footage. In a region as saturated with cameras as Metro Vancouver, in-car dash cams, business security systems, doorbell cams, that kind of appeal usually works fast. This time it worked especially fast.

Within a day, police had 2 people in custody. Riza Jafari, 32. Hatice Haydari, 28. A married couple. Both charged with second-degree murder.

An IHIT spokesperson, Corporal Esther Tupper, told reporters investigators believed the parties involved were all known to one another, and that there was no ongoing risk to public safety.

Translation: this wasn't random. This wasn't a stranger. Everybody involved already knew everybody else.

**POLICE PERSPECTIVE:** That line, known to one another, is doing 2 jobs at once. It's reassuring the public, telling people they don't need to be nervous walking down First Avenue tomorrow. But it's also telling you, if you know how to read it, that this wasn't a whodunit. When police can say that within a day of a body hitting the pavement, it usually means the physical evidence pointed somewhere fast. In this case, both knives were recovered from inside the couple's own car. That's not a case that takes months to crack. The hard part here was never finding the killer. It was figuring out why.

CHAPTER 2: THREE PEOPLE WHO USED TO BE FRIENDS

To understand how this ended with a man dead in the street, you have to go back further than that Monday evening.

Riza Jafari was 34. Afghan, but born and raised in Iran. He married Hatice Haydari in Iran in 2016. In 2022, the two of them came to Canada. He became a permanent resident, worked as a flooring installer, and had no criminal record. They had 2 children together, a son who was 6 and is autistic, and a daughter who was 8. Jafari had no family in Canada at all. His own parents were living in Turkey.

Fred Sangan was 40. And according to the court record, he and Jafari and Haydari had been friends.

That's the detail that makes this case land differently than most. This wasn't a stranger who fixated on a married woman from a distance. This was somebody already inside the circle.

At some point, Haydari and Sangan began an affair. In the course of it, Sangan came into possession of intimate photos and videos of her. The record doesn't say exactly how, whether she sent them, whether he recorded them, whether it started consensually and turned into something else. What we do know is what happened after.

CHAPTER 3: THE ACCOUNT

About a week before Fred Sangan died, somebody created an Instagram account. The profile photo was a selfie of Hatice Haydari, in her underwear and a tank top.

Then invitations to follow that account went out. Not to strangers. To her family. To Jafari's family too.

There's no ransom demand anywhere in the record, no dollar figure attached to any of this. It's colder than blackmail in the classic sense. It's a threat that's already been carried out. The account already exists. The photo is already up. The invitations are already sent. The only question left is how far it spreads.

Sangan didn't take it down. According to the agreed statement of facts read at trial, Haydari and Jafari asked him, more than once, to delete the account and hand over the rest of the images and videos he had. He refused.

Haydari went to police for help. She got none. The court's own reasons for sentence say it plainly: she sought assistance and received none.

Jafari tried a different route. He met with Sangan's partner, a woman named Sophia Soltani, hoping to resolve things directly. That meeting went nowhere.

So by the middle of June 2024, you have a woman being shamed to her own family with no legal remedy in sight, and a husband who'd already tried the reasonable path and hit a wall.

**POLICE PERSPECTIVE:** This is the part I think most people will relate to, and it's also the part that makes what came next worse, not better. A woman goes to police because someone is threatening to spread her intimate images to her family, and by her own account and the court's own words, she got no help. I don't know the specifics of that interaction and I'm not going to guess at them. But non-consensual intimate image cases have historically been hard for police to move on quickly, because the law hasn't always kept pace with how fast this kind of harm spreads online. That gap, between somebody threatening you right now and the system actually stopping them right now, is where people who feel like they have no other option make the worst decision of their lives. That gap didn't cause what happened. Two people chose to bring knives to a meeting. But it's worth naming, because it's the foundation this whole case grew out of.

CHAPTER 4: THE MEETING

On June 17, 2024, Sangan summoned Haydari to meet him.

She agreed to go. According to the sentencing decision, she was hoping to persuade him to hand over the photos and videos and stop what the judge called his campaign to shame her.

Before they left, both Haydari and Jafari armed themselves with kitchen knives, concealed in their clothing.

Haydari drove. Jafari rode in the back seat. They headed to a commercial stretch of East 1st Avenue in Burnaby, about 2 blocks east of Boundary Road, the meeting spot Sangan had chosen. When they arrived, Jafari moved from the back seat to the front, and Haydari got out and walked to Sangan's car alone.

That detail matters, and it matters again later. She approached him by herself. He watched from his own vehicle.

There was extensive video of what happened next, cameras from both of their cars and CCTV from nearby businesses, along with limited audio, mostly captured from inside Sangan's own car.

CHAPTER 5: WHAT THE CAMERAS SAW, PART ONE

Haydari got into Sangan's car. They started talking.

At some point, Haydari took Sangan's cellphone and threw it out the window.

Sangan responded by assaulting her. He slapped her. He grabbed her by the neck and the face.

Jafari, watching from his own car, saw the altercation. He got out and moved quickly toward the driver's side door, sliding a knife out of his left sleeve as he went.

The moment he reached the door, he started stabbing at Sangan's torso while Sangan was still trying to get out of the car. At least 2 of those first strikes caused injury.

Haydari was yelling, "no," repeated, loud. She got out of the car and tried to physically pull Jafari away. It didn't work.

CHAPTER 6: WHAT THE CAMERAS SAW, PART TWO

There was a pause. Sangan, still in the driver's seat, got Jafari into a headlock. Sangan told him he was going to kill him. Jafari said the same thing back.

Then all 3 of them ended up outside the vehicle, and a second, longer phase of the assault began. This time it was 2 against 1. The video shows Haydari stabbing Sangan in the back and shoulder while the struggle continued, and it captures something Jafari said in that moment, encouraging his wife by her first name: "Hit him, Narges."

At some point all 3 went to the ground. Sangan ended up face down on the curb, beside the front passenger tire of a parked minivan. That minivan blocked several nearby cameras, which is why not everything that happened next made it onto video.

What the footage does show is this. Both Haydari and Jafari stabbed Sangan repeatedly over a few seconds while he lay there. Jafari's arm is visible making a repeated thrusting motion, and the court believes he was likely kneeling in front of Sangan at that point.

Then Haydari stopped. She looked distraught. She turned to a bystander nearby and asked them to call 911.

Jafari kept going a little longer. Then he stood up. The court's word for how he looked in that moment is exhausted.

**POLICE PERSPECTIVE:** Courts pay close attention to pauses like this one, and so do investigators, because a pause changes the legal picture. If somebody strikes another person in one continuous burst, that's one thing. If they stop, catch their breath, and then choose to start again, that's a decision, even if it happens 90 seconds later. Hold onto that. It matters again in a minute.

CHAPTER 7: THE PART NO CAMERA CAUGHT

Fred Sangan was still alive, lying face down on the curb.

A short time after Jafari stood up and stepped away, he went back.

This part isn't on any recovered video, the minivan blocked the angle, but a bystander named Mr. Da Silva saw it happen with his own eyes.

Da Silva watched Jafari kneel down on top of Sangan, who was still face down, and start poking him in the back with the knife. Then Jafari leaned in and whispered something in Sangan's ear. Da Silva couldn't make out the words. Then Jafari stabbed him in the back.

He leaned down and whispered again.

Then he stabbed him in the back one more time.

Two deliberate strikes, each one preceded by Jafari leaning in close enough to say something directly into a dying man's ear. Nobody but Sangan ever heard what that was.

Then Jafari took out his phone and photographed Sangan's body lying prone on the pavement. He sent that photo to Sophia Soltani, Sangan's partner. Along with it, a text message written in Farsi. Translated: "You're next, don't choke."

That was the message a 9-year-old boy's mother received about the man who had been the only father figure in that boy's life since he was 2.

CHAPTER 8: FLIGHT AND SURRENDER

A crowd was starting to gather. According to the sentencing decision, a larger group arrived on scene, some of them carrying pipes and sticks. Whether they were reacting to what they'd witnessed or arriving for other reasons, the record doesn't say. But Jafari and Haydari saw them coming, and they ran.

They got in their car and drove off.

They didn't get far, and they didn't stay gone long. A short time later, they turned around, drove back, and surrendered to police.

Both kitchen knives were recovered from inside the passenger compartment of their car.

By the next afternoon, the BC Prosecution Service had laid charges. Second-degree murder, against both of them.

CHAPTER 9: FROM CHARGE TO VERDICT

Here's the timeline of how this case actually moved through the courts.

June 17, 2024: Fred Sangan is killed. Jafari and Haydari are arrested at the scene.

June 18, 2024: Both are formally charged with second-degree murder.

Early 2026: Riza Jafari's trial opens in BC Supreme Court in Vancouver, before a jury. Jafari pleads not guilty. In the Crown's opening, prosecutor David Meagher tells the jury he expects the evidence to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Jafari is guilty of murder. He tells them they'll hear from bystanders, from police officers, and from a forensic pathologist.

An agreed statement of facts is read into the record: the affair, the fake Instagram account, the mirror selfie, the invitations sent to both families, Sangan's refusal to take it down. Neither side disputes those events happened. What's in dispute is what they add up to, legally.

The jury sees the video. They hear the audio. They hear from Da Silva about the part no camera caught. They hear from the forensic pathologist, Dr. Bilimoria, about what actually killed Fred Sangan.

And at the end of it, the jury comes back with a verdict that surprised a lot of people following the case. Not guilty of second-degree murder. Guilty of the lesser included offence of manslaughter.

Hatice Haydari's case was handled separately. She pleaded guilty to manslaughter on her own, and at the time of Jafari's sentencing, she was still waiting to be sentenced.

CHAPTER 10: MURDER, MURDER, OR MANSLAUGHTER? THE THREE BOXES

Before we get into what the evidence actually did in that courtroom, I want to slow down and explain something, because I think it's the single most confusing part of this entire case for anyone who isn't a lawyer. What is the actual difference between first-degree murder, second-degree murder, and manslaughter?

In Canada, all 3 fall under one umbrella called culpable homicide, which just means an unlawful killing. But the law splits that umbrella into 3 boxes, and which box you land in has almost nothing to do with how violent or graphic the killing looked. It comes down to one question: what was going on inside the killer's head.

**First-degree murder.** This is the most serious box, and it requires the Crown to prove 2 separate things. First, that the accused meant to cause death, or meant to cause bodily harm they knew was likely to cause death and didn't care whether it did. That's the same mental state required for any murder. Second, and this is what pushes it into first degree specifically, that the killing was planned and deliberate. Thought out ahead of time. Not a decision made in the heat of an unfolding situation. There are also a few automatic categories, killing a police officer in the line of duty, or a killing that happens during certain other serious crimes like kidnapping or sexual assault, that get bumped to first degree even without proof of planning. None of those automatic categories applied here.

**Second-degree murder.** This is every murder that isn't first degree. The intent is exactly the same, the accused still has to have meant to kill, or meant to cause harm they knew was likely to kill and didn't care. What's missing is the planning. This is what Riza Jafari was actually charged with and tried for.

**Manslaughter.** This is what's left when a death is caused unlawfully, but the Crown can't prove that specific intent, either the intent to kill, or the knowledge that what you were doing was likely to kill. It still has to start with an unlawful act, you can't be convicted of manslaughter over something that wasn't a crime at all. But the person doesn't have to have wanted the death, or even to have understood that death was a likely outcome of what they were doing in that moment.

Here's the simplest way I can put it. Murder is measured by what you meant to happen. Manslaughter is measured by what you did, and what resulted from it, even when killing was never the plan.

The penalties reflect that gap. Both degrees of murder carry a mandatory life sentence, with a required minimum number of years before parole eligibility, 25 years for first degree, and somewhere between 10 and 25 years for second degree, set by the judge. Manslaughter carries no fixed minimum in a case like this one, and while its maximum is also technically life in prison, in practice, as we saw at Jafari's own sentencing hearing, most manslaughter cases land somewhere between 4 and 15 years.

**POLICE PERSPECTIVE:** People sometimes hear the word manslaughter and assume it means the death was somehow less serious, or less deserving of real punishment. Jafari's own 10-year starting point should put that idea to rest. Manslaughter isn't a measure of how bad the outcome was. Fred Sangan is just as dead either way. It's a measure of what the Crown could actually prove about what was happening inside the accused's head in the moment it counted, and that turns out to be a much harder thing to prove than most people expect, especially inside a fast, chaotic, multi-person struggle like this one.

CHAPTER 11: THE EVIDENCE, EXPLAINED

Now that you know what the jury was actually choosing between, let's walk through what they had in front of them.

**The video and audio.** This was the spine of the whole case. Multiple camera angles from both vehicles and nearby businesses captured most of the assault in real time, along with partial audio from inside Sangan's car. The jury wasn't relying on anyone's memory. They were watching it happen.

**The gap in coverage.** The parked minivan that blocked several cameras during the final phase meant the jury had no video of the last 2 stab wounds, the ones delivered after Jafari had already stood up, walked away, and gone back. For that piece, the Crown leaned entirely on Da Silva, a bystander with no connection to anyone involved, who testified to what he personally saw.

**The forensic pathology.** Dr. Bilimoria testified Sangan died from blood loss and organ damage caused by the combined sharp-force injuries, 35 in total. Of those, 19, to the torso, front and back, were serious enough on their own to have caused the fatal blood loss and organ damage. Bilimoria could not say which wounds came from which of the 2 knives. That inability to separate Jafari's wounds from Haydari's is a big part of why both of them were charged, and both ultimately convicted, for the same death.

**The phone and the text.** The photo Jafari took of Sangan's body, and the message he sent with it, became some of the most damaging evidence in the case, not because it proved intent to kill in the moment of the stabbing, but because of what it showed about his state of mind right after. A person who's just killed somebody by accident, or in a moment of panic defending someone they love, doesn't typically stop to photograph the body and send a threat in the same breath. The sentencing judge would later call this evidence of strong animus, real, personal hatred, not just a fight that spun out of control.

So why manslaughter, specifically, in this case?

Canadian juries don't explain their verdicts. They deliver a decision, not their reasoning, so nobody, not the lawyers, not the judge, not us, gets to know exactly what tipped the balance inside that jury room. But based on what the law actually requires and what the evidence showed, there are a few realistic possibilities.

One is doubt about intent during the chaotic parts of the struggle. The first and second phases of the attack happened fast, inside a 3-person fight that included a headlock, Haydari physically trying to pull Jafari away, and 2 armed people moving in and out of a confined space. A jury could reasonably have doubted that Jafari, in those specific moments, had formed the clear intent to kill, or clear knowledge his actions were likely to kill, as opposed to an intent simply to hurt Sangan or make him stop.

Another is the defence-of-another dynamic at the start of the encounter. Jafari moved on Sangan only after watching him slap and grab Haydari by the neck. Canadian law does recognize a person's right to use force in defence of somebody else. Nothing in the record suggests the jury accepted a full self-defence claim, that would have produced a full acquittal, not a manslaughter conviction, but it's possible that context lowered the jury's confidence that the opening minutes of the attack were driven by a clear intent to kill, rather than an overreaction to a threat against his wife.

A third possibility is simpler than either of those. Second-degree murder has a specific, demanding mental element, and Canadian courts instruct juries carefully that if they aren't sure, sure beyond a reasonable doubt, that the accused meant to kill, or meant to cause harm they knew was likely to kill, they cannot convict of murder, even if they're certain an unlawful killing happened. Manslaughter exists as exactly that landing spot, for cases where the death is beyond dispute but the mental state required for murder isn't proven to the standard the law demands.

What's harder to reconcile with any of this is the final act. Jafari returning to a helpless, prone Sangan, whispering to him twice, and delivering 2 more stab wounds. On its face, that looks like exactly the kind of clear-headed, intentional conduct the murder charge was built for. But the jury only had to find reasonable doubt about intent, not certainty of its absence, and it's possible they weighed that final act against everything that came before it, the headlock, the struggle, 2 people stabbing at once with nobody able to say which knife did what, and landed on a verdict that reflected the case as a whole rather than any single moment inside it.

**POLICE PERSPECTIVE:** I've sat with frustrated families over the years who don't understand how a jury can watch footage like this and not come back with murder. I get it. But a jury isn't grading how bad something looks. They're applying a legal test, and that test has one narrow question at its center, not "was this awful," but "did the Crown prove exactly what the law requires, to the standard the law requires." When they can't get there on every element, the law gives them a lesser verdict to land on instead of walking away empty-handed. That's not the system failing. That's the system doing exactly what it's built to do, even when the result is hard to sit with.

CHAPTER 12: THE SENTENCING HEARING

Jafari's sentencing hearing was held in Vancouver in June 2026, before Justice M. Tammen.

The 2 sides were far apart. The Crown, arguing this was a case of what's called aggravated manslaughter, asked for 10 to 11 years. The defence asked for a range of 4 to 5 years, with an actual sentence of 4.

Both sides brought a stack of prior cases to argue where this one belonged. And that range, it turns out, is enormous. Justice Tammen noted manslaughter carries a maximum sentence of life in prison, but most cases actually land somewhere between 4 and 15 years, with the truly aggravated ones, the cases the courts treat as close to murder without quite reaching it, typically falling between 8 and 12.

The defence leaned on cases involving a single attacker, often a young first-time offender who'd already turned their life around by the time of sentencing. The Crown countered with a case called Bosch, where a 20-year-old first offender got 9 years for what the sentencing judge in that case had also called aggravated manslaughter.

Justice Tammen worked through the aggravating and mitigating factors directly, and there were far more of the former than the latter.

On the aggravating side: Sangan was cornered inside his own car with no way out when the first attack began. A knife was used. For much of the assault it was 2 against 1, and Jafari was heard actively encouraging his wife to keep going. The final 2 stab wounds were delivered while Sangan was completely helpless, face down on the pavement. The number of injuries was extreme. The attack was driven by real, personal animosity, evidenced directly by the photo and text sent within minutes. And despite having a phone in his hand, Jafari never called for help.

On the mitigating side, there were exactly 2 things in Jafari's favour. He'd indicated a willingness to plead guilty to manslaughter before the trial even started. And he'd behaved well in custody while he waited.

The defence tried 2 other arguments, and the judge rejected both, clearly and without much hesitation.

The first was about Jafari's children. Both were now in the care of the Ministry of Children and Family Development, and the defence argued reuniting the family should weigh heavily on the sentence. Justice Tammen called the situation unfortunate, even heartbreaking, but said plainly that both parents committing a serious crime and both serving prison time wasn't something the law allows him to treat as legally significant to sentencing itself.

The second was about pretrial custody. Jafari's lawyers argued he'd faced particular hardship there, difficulty adjusting because of the language barrier, and being denied special food during Ramadan, and that he deserved extra credit toward his sentence because of it. The judge didn't accept that either. The Criminal Code already caps credit for time served before sentencing at 1.5 days for every day served, and nothing Jafari described amounted to the kind of harsh, authority-caused conditions that would justify going beyond that cap.

Justice Tammen's conclusion was direct. Jafari's moral blameworthiness, he said, was extremely high. He found this was, in fact, a case of aggravated manslaughter, and the appropriate range was 8 to 12 years.

The judge landed in the middle of that range. Jafari was sentenced to Ten years in prison.

EPILOGUE

Two victim impact statements were read into the record at that sentencing hearing. One from Sophia Soltani, who was engaged to marry Fred Sangan when he died. One from her son, Amir Mollazadeh, who was 9.

Fred Sangan had been the only father figure in that boy's life since he was 2.

I keep coming back to that detail, because it's easy, in a case built around video timelines and forensic percentages and sentencing math, to lose track of the fact that a child lost a parent here. Not biologically. But in every way that actually matters to a 9-year-old.

And I keep coming back to the other 2 children in this story, Jafari and Haydari's son and daughter, 6 and 8, now in government care, with both of their parents serving federal time for the same killing. Justice Tammen was right that the law can't let that outcome shape the sentence. But it doesn't make it any less true that 3 children, on both sides of this, are the ones left to live with what 2 adults decided to do on a June evening in Burnaby.

Hatice Haydari's own sentencing hadn't happened as of this recording. She's pleaded guilty to manslaughter and is expected to be sentenced soon. When that happens, this case finally closes for both of them. It isn't closed yet.

What strikes me most about this one isn't the violence, though there's plenty of it. It's how ordinary the beginning was. Three people who knew each other. An affair. A cruel decision to weaponize someone's private photos instead of just letting the relationship end. And 2 people who, instead of walking away from a meeting that was never going to go well, brought knives to it instead.

Fred Sangan made a cruel choice when he built that account and refused, again and again, to take it down. Nothing that follows undoes that. But the response to cruelty, in a functioning society, isn't supposed to be a knife. It's supposed to be a courtroom. Hatice Haydari tried the courtroom first. She said she got nothing back. What happened next was 2 people deciding to be the law themselves.

That never ends well. It didn't here either.

This episode was written, researched, and produced by me, Ryan Dell. Please leave me a 5-star review.

I love hearing from you. If there's a case you think I should cover, send me an email. My address is canadiancrimecast@gmail.com.

I'm Ryan Dell, and this is Canadian CrimeCast: Coast to Coast True Crime.

Before I let you go, take a moment to reflect …… at the end of a shift like the one on First Avenue, The RCMP officers and paramedics go home, hug their kids, and try to act normal. That gap, between what they just saw and what dinner requires, is a harder job than most people ever have to do.