“Aqsa was always trying to get us to go
shopping with her,” schoolmate Dominiquia Holmes-Thompson said.
“We were supposed to go to the mall together today.”
Last week, Ms. Parvez temporarily moved
in with a friend from school.
“She said she wasn't getting along well
with her family and that things weren't right,” said Trudy
Looby, the mother of one of Ms. Parvez's friends, Alisha. “When
she was here, she was very happy.”
Ms. Looby said she told Ms. Parvez to
inform her parents about where she was staying. “She notified me
that the school was aware of where she was staying and that that
was okay,” the mother said.
During her stay, Ms. Looby said, Ms.
Parvez didn't wear the hijab, a head scarf that friends said was
a hot topic within her family.
Krista Garbutt remembers walking down
the street with Ms. Parvez earlier this year, when the two of
them spotted Ms. Parvez's brother walking toward them.
Panicking, the teenager quickly fumbled for her head scarf,
trying to put it on. “There were times when we'd be walking down
the street and she'd see her brother and she wouldn't be wearing
her hijab and she'd have to put it on,” Ms. Garbutt said. “She
said, ‘He'll kill me, he'll kill me.' I said, ‘He's not going to
kill you,' but she said, ‘Yeah, he will.' And nobody believed
it.”
On Monday morning, Peel Regional Police
responded to a 911 call from a man who said he had just killed
his daughter. When officers arrived at a single-family detached
home on Longhorn Trail, they found Ms. Parvez suffering from
life-threatening injuries. She was taken immediately to Credit
Valley Hospital and later transferred in critical condition to
the Hospital for Sick Children, where she died.
Peel police said the Crown is waiting to
decide whether Mr. Parvez should be charged with first- or
second-degree murder, pending a police investigation. Although
police would not elaborate on the ongoing homicide
investigation, the difference between laying a first- or
second-degree murder charge often rests on proving that the
killing was premeditated.
Ms. Garbutt said the teenager went home
on Monday to collect her belongings, at which point her father
“basically went ballistic.”
For weeks before, Ms. Parvez had been
living something of a double life, friends said.
“She wanted peace with her family,”
Alisha Looby said. “She wanted to make them happy but she wanted
to be herself at the same time, and there's nothing wrong with
that.”
A makeshift memorial is already in place
at Applewood Heights, full of mementoes and messages left by
grieving students.
“Aqsa was honestly the brightest girl
around. She had the biggest smile and was the happiest person in
school. She loved to dance and take pictures,” one student
wrote.
Across Canada, the killing has taken on
larger proportions. On call-in shows and websites, many have
used the incident as part of a wider indictment of
fundamentalist Islam. One Canadian conservative blogger
suggested Canadians boycott taxicabs driven by Muslims.
In a statement Tuesday, the Canadian
Council on American-Islamic Relations called on Canadians of all
faiths to address issues of domestic abuse, and called for “the
strongest possible prosecution” of those responsible for Ms.
Parvez's killing.
Trudy Looby, who let Ms. Parvez stay at
her home last week, said she now wishes the teen had not left.
“I was feeling that whatever it was she
was dealing with at home was a bit too personal to involve me
in,” Ms. Looby said. “I wish she would have stayed longer,
that's all. It's a sad waste of life.”