“And what did I do to you?” Pooya asked. “I just told you, Go out of my life. I just don’t want to see you anymore, and you came back and you kill everybody and you wanna kill me and yourself?”

They heard sirens. A.K. turned his face to the sound of more police arriving. That’s when Pooya grabbed the muzzle of the gun and pushed it away, hitting A.K. in the face with his right fist. A.K. pulled the trigger; bullets were flying around the room. “Tat-a-tat-a-tat—constant,” Pooya says. Some of them must have hit A.K., because there was now blood on him and on Pooya’s face and chest. “You shot me in my stomach!” Pooya screamed, hoping A.K. would believe he was already shot (he wasn’t).

They struggled for the gun, stumbling into Koory’s room, next door. They fell onto the bed, Pooya pushing the gun straight against A.K.’s throat while punching him in the face. He saw A.K. taking something out of his pocket—a gun clip; he was carrying five magazines containing 100 rounds of ammunition. “I was going to grab it, but he pulled my shirt and got me off him,” Pooya says.

A.K. yanked Pooya off the bed, flinging him through the door and toward the stairs, where he pushed him away, running up toward the roof. Pooya locked the door to the roof behind him. Now the cops were racing into the building. They heard a single shot. A.K. had killed himself.

“You Don’t Hear Stories Like That in Iran”

Since the day of the shooting, when then commissioner Ray Kelly called it the result of a “dispute . . . over money,” the N.Y.P.D. has provided few details other than to say that the gun was first legally purchased in 2006 in a now closed gun store in upstate New York. Iranians who knew the victims are perplexed at how the freedom their friends sought in America was taken away by the shooter. How did Ali Akbar Rafie—jobless, poor, and an immigrant with an expired visa—get his hands on an assault rifle?, they ask. “You don’t hear stories like that in Iran, people going nuts and blowing up their friends or family,” says the writer Hooman Majd. The parents of Ali Eskandarian issued a statement on their son’s Facebook page extending their condolences to the parents of all the victims. “To Ali Rafie,” they wrote, “from the bottom of our hearts, we forgive you.”

In Iran itself, the tragedy was a major story. “The Yellow Dogs are countercultural heroes there,” says an Iranian musician. There was controversy when Arash and Soroush Farazmand’s bodies were buried in the largest cemetery in Tehran, in a section reserved for prominent people in the arts. Some conservative religious figures in the country felt the brothers did not deserve this honor, but their funeral drew thousands. Ali Akbar Rafie’s sister Saideh Rafie promoted conspiracy theories on the Iran News Network, speculating that her brother was murdered by a Zionist organization as part of a plot to muddy negotiations between Iran and America about the curtailment of Iran’s nuclear-enrichment program and the lifting of sanctions.

The memorial for Arash, Looloosh, and Ali Eskandarian, in November at the Cameo Gallery, was terribly somber. Downstairs, in the performance space, which was alight with candles, people were invited to speak their memories, but for almost an hour no one managed to say anything. There was only hugging, crying.

“They were the cutest kids ever,” said Poya Esghai, former guitarist for Hypernova, talking of Arash and Looloosh later, upstairs in the bar. “They were so polite; they never did anything bad to anyone. They were always smiling and good musicians.” “If you had told them four years ago,” said their friend Jason Shams, “You’re going to go to America, play music, and have this great band, but in four years you’ll be shot dead, they still would have got on the plane.”

Correction: The original version of the story stated that the Free Keys were asked to leave the Yellow Dogs’ Maujer Street apartment, but according to Pooya Hosseni, the band left on its own accord. The story stated that the Free Keys were unable to finish sets at more than one show, but that occurred only once. The article also said that Hosseini lived alone with Ali Akbar Rafie, in Queens. Hosseini never lived alone with Rafie. We regret the errors.