29-year-old musician Ali Akbar Muhammadi Rafi committed suicide after shooting to death three members of his former indie band Yellow Dogs in the Brooklyn apartment where they lived and practiced, the New York Police Department said, as reported by CNN. Rafi reportedly was kicked out of the group last year.
The dead victims include the 27-year-old Soroush Farazmand whose rock band the Yellow Dogs was featured in a 2009 CNN report about Iran's underground rock scene. 28-year-old Arash Farazmand and 35-year-old Ali Eskandarian were also killed.
New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly told reporters that the gunman used a .308 caliber assault rifle apparently to settle a "dispute... over money," he said.
The gunman shot and killed one of the victims through a window before entering the building in the East Williamsburg neighborhood and shooting the others on the second and third floors, Kelly said.
"Ali Eskandarian was nearly finished with his memoir, Arash had just received political asylum from Iran and Soroush was hard at work on new Yellow Dogs material," the surviving bandmembers said. "Everything we had hoped and worked for was finally coming true. ... The future was so incredibly bright.
The band will continue to make music, they added.
"We will not let this disgusting brutality define us or become our story, but instead respond by creating music more passionately and with more intensity than ever before, embracing the freedom that we all dreamed would one day be ours back in Iran and play to honor those who should be playing next to us."
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