The youngest son of the late shah of Iran was found dead Tuesday of an apparent suicide at his home in Boston, after he had "struggled for years to overcome his sorrow," his brother said. 
 
 FILE - In this March 30, 1979 file photo, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran, third from left, poses with his family while vacationing in the Bahamas. From left are daughter Leila Pahlavi, son Alireza... (Associated Press) 
 
 A Boston police cruiser drives past the South End home of Alireza Pahlavi in Boston late Tuesday afternoon, Jan. 4, 2011. Pahlavi, the youngest son of the late shah of Iran, was found dead Tuesday of... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this Friday, April 15, 2005 file photo, Alireza Pahlavi is seen during Prince Rainier III's funeral procession, in Monaco. Pahlavi, son of the late shah of Iran, has been found dead of an apparent... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this Friday, April 15, 2005 file photo, Iran's Farah Pahlavi, widow of Iranian Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, right, and her son Alireza Pahlavi, are seen during Prince Rainier III's funeral procession,... (Associated Press) 
 
 A Boston Police Officer walks up the front steps of the South End home of Alireza Pahlavi as a woman walks past in Boston, late Tuesday afternoon, Jan. 4, 2011. Pahlavi, the youngest son of the late shah... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this Jan. 26, 1975, file photo, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran, center, sits with his children Princess Leila, left, and Prince Alireza, during a vacation in St. Moritz, Switzerland. Alireza... (Associated Press) 
 
 "Once again, we are joined with mothers, father and relatives of so many victims of these dark times for our country," the shah's oldest son, Reza Pahlavi, wrote on his website in announcing the death of his brother, Alireza Pahlavi. 
 
 Pahlavi, 44, died from a single gunshot wound that was apparently self-inflicted, said Jake Wark, a spokesman for the Suffolk District Attorney's office. 
 
 Boston police said officers responding to a 911 call found the man dead in his home in the city's South End neighborhood shortly after 2 a.m. Tuesday. A police spokesman did not know who made the call or whether it came from the home. 
 
 Fardia Pars, who is close to Reza Pahlavi, said by phone from Paris that Alireza Pahlavi went into a deep depression following his the death of his sister Leila in 2001, who was found in a London hotel room at age 31 after overdosing on barbiturates. 
 
 Alireza Pahlavi never recovered, Pars said. 
 
 "He became a different person," he said. 
 
 Pahlavi's depression "grew over time _ his departure from Iran, living in exile, the death of his father and then his sister to whom he was very close," said Nazie Eftekhari, who works in Reza Pahlavi's office in Washington and is a close family friend. 
 
 "The deaths were a huge blow to him," she said. 
 
 When Leila Pahlavi died, her mother said her daughter had been "very depressed." Her doctor had said she had a history of anorexia, bulimia and psychological problems. 
 
 Pars said Alireza's style even in taking his life was militaristic in nature, reflecting his royal background. "Like an army commander, he shot himself. He was a very disciplined man," Pars said. 
 
 Former Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic revolution. He fled Iran and wandered from country to country, ill with cancer, and eventually died in Egypt in 1980. 
 
 Alireza Pahlavi was born in Tehran in 1966 and attended school there until 1979, according to a brief biographical sketch on the website of his mother, the former empress Farah Pahlavi. 
 
 From 1979 to 1981, Pahlavi attended schools in New York and Cairo, and from 1981 to 1984 he attended Mount Greylock Regional High School in Williamstown, Mass. 
 
 Pahlavi studied music as an undergraduate at Princeton University and ancient Iranian studies as a graduate student at Columbia University. 
 
 He also did postgraduate work at Harvard University in ancient Iranian studies and philology. Pahlavi was not studying at the university at the time of his death, a Harvard spokesman said Tuesday. 
 
 A police officer was seen late Tuesday afternoon going in and out of Pahlavi's Boston apartment and speaking with family representatives, who would not talk to reporters. 
 
 A neighbor, Dan Phillips, 42, said he did not know Pahlavi personally but recognized his picture and described him as someone who was very social and "who always dressed very dapper." 
 
 "I would always see him walking around here and he used to wear blue jeans and a blazer," Phillips said. 
 
 Trita Parsi, the president of the National Iranian American Council, said in a statement that "the Iranian-American community was deeply saddened by the news of this tragedy. 
 
 "There are many divisions in the community, but on a day like this, I think we are all united in our sympathy with the Pahlavi family for their tragic and painful loss," Parsi said. 
 
 Reza Pahlavi, who is based in the U.S., has spoken out in opposition to Iran's clerical regime. It's not clear how much weight exiled opposition forces have inside Iran, nor how many Iranians support the idea of a return to monarchy. Pahlavi said in 2009 that that is not his goal. 
 
 "I'm not here to advocate anything but ... freedom and democracy for the Iranian people at first and I've determined this as my unique mission in life," he said at the time. 
 
 Pahlavi will head to Boston on Wednesday, Eftekhari said, and she expected his mother, who's in Paris, to go as well. 
 
 Eftekhari said the family asks to be allowed to mourn privately for a few days and that no funeral arrangements have yet been made. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Associated Press writers Scheherezade Faramarzi in Beirut; Matthew Barakat in McLean, Va.; and Bob Salsberg and Russell Contreras in Boston contributed to this report. ||||| The posting continued, “although he struggled for years to overcome his sorrow, he finally succumbed, and during the night of the 4th of January 2011, in his Boston residence, took his own life, plunging his family and friends into great sorrow.’’ 
 
 “It is with immense grief that we would like to inform our compatriots of the passing away of Prince Alireza Pahlavi,’’ according to the posting by his older brother, Reza Pahlavi. “Like millions of young Iranians, he too was deeply disturbed by all the ills fallen upon his beloved homeland, as well as carrying the burden of losing a father and a sister in his young life.’’ 
 
 Prince Ali-Reza Pahlavi was found inside his West Newton Street home by Boston police around 2 a.m. today, according to police and the posting on rezapahlavi.org. 
 
 The 44-year-old son of the late shah of Iran died early this morning inside his South End home after he allegedly shot himself, according to law enforcement officials and a Web posting by his brother. 
 
 The statement added, “Once again, we are joined with mothers, father and relatives of so many victims of these dark times for our country.’’ 
 
 Jake Wark, a spokesman for Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley, confirmed the identify of the body as Al-Rreza. 
 
 Al-Reza Pahlavi’s father was the shah of Iran and a close American ally. The shah was overthrown in the 1970s by a fundamentalist Islamic revolution that remains in power, bedeviling the current American administration with reported plans to produce nuclear weapons. 
 
 Ali-Reza was born in 1966 and has lived in the South End for many years, but has kept a low public profile. The Globe reported incorrectly earlier today that Pahlavi was a student at the Harvard Divinity School. In fact, Pahlavi enrolled in a doctorate program in Near Eastern languages and civilizations at Harvard in 1993 but did not complete his degree, according to the registrar's office of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. 
 
 His older brother, Reza Pahlavi, is a lawyer who lives in the United States and has taken a much more public role in opposing the continued control of his homeland. 
 
 A younger sister, Leila Pahlavi, died in a London hotel room in 2001 from an accidental overdose of prescription drugs,according to the Agence France Press. She also battled emotional problems for many years. 
 
 Boston police spokeswoman Elaine Driscoll said that “preliminary investigation suggests that the bullet wound was self-inflicted.’’ 
 
 Neighbors said Pahlavi was reserved and quiet. He bought the five-story brick rowhouse in 2001, according to city records, and renovated it. 
 
 Daniel Shannon, a doctor and scientist who lived across the street from Pahlavi, said he first met the prince in 1973 in his father's castle in Iran, where Shannon had gone with a small group of doctors and scientists to advise the shah, who wanted to build a medical science center. 
 
 At the time, Pahlavi was about 7 years old, curious, friendly and with an impressive knowledge of the United States, Shannon said. 
 
 Shannon said he was shocked to see Pahlavi again on West Newton Street years later, this time as his neighbor. 
 
 "He was the spitting image of his father," Shannon said. "I recognized him right away." 
 
 But the open child had grown into a reserved man whose face froze when Shannon brought up their first meeting in the 1970s. 
 
 "What I read in that is he didn't want to talk about it," Shannon said. "When I mentioned having known him as a child, the reserve turned to ice." 
 
 After that, Shannon and his wife, Marcia Lloyd, rarely saw him around the neighborhood. He would pull up in his black Porsche and dart inside the house. The only people the couple saw were another friend and a striking young woman who studied painting. 
 
 The wooden, Venetian blinds in the windows were always closed, Lloyd said. 
 
 He had placed satellite dishes with Arabic letters on the roof of the house so he could access Al Jazeera, but they disappeared about a year ago, Lloyd said. 
 
 "We've seen him so seldom that it was hard to know if someone was living there or not," Shannon said. "He might have come here to be in a place where he was a little anonymous." 
 
 Late this afternoon, the blinds remained closed. On West Newton street, a police cruiser idled as three men from the crime scene clean up company, Aftermath Inc., went back and forth from their van into Pahlavi's house holding plastic buckets and hoses. 
 
 An elderly man answered the door but told a reporter he could not comment. 
 
 John Tirman, a professor of international affairs at MIT in Cambridge, said the Pahlavi family has not played a major role in Iranian politics since the family left Iran, partly because the family was reviled by many Iranians because of the ruthlessness of the shah’s regime and the family’s extravagant lifestyle while in power. 
 
 “We don’t like what is in Iran right now,’’ Tirman said. “But what was there before was pretty nasty, too.’’ 
 
 Tirman said he did not know Ali-Reza Pahlavi personally. adding that many close followers of the Pahlavis relocated to the United States after the shah's fall from power. The largest concentration is in California. he said. 
 
 “It’s a very big community in the US, very well educated,’’ Tirman said. “Many Iranians have been quite successful in business and academia and elsewhere in the US. It’s not an exile community that had a head exactly, they were first among equals in that exile community.’’ ||||| FILE- In this Dec. 10, 1978 file photo of exiled Muslim leader Ayatollah Khomeini overshadows huge anti-Shah demonstration at the Shahyad monument commemorating 25 years of the monarch's rule and symbol... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE- In this Dec. 10, 1978 file photo of exiled Muslim leader Ayatollah Khomeini overshadows huge anti-Shah demonstration at the Shahyad monument commemorating 25 years of the monarch's rule and symbol of his power, in Tehran, Iran. The discovery in Iran of a mummified body near the site of a former... (Associated Press) 
 
 DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — A mummified body discovered near the site of a former royal mausoleum in Iran may be the remains of Reza Shah Pahlavi, the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty and the father of the country's last shah. 
 
 The recent find of the gauze-wrapped body — and the speculation it triggered — puts new hurdles in the way of the Islamic Republic's efforts to fully erase the country's dynastic past, which includes the jack-hammered destruction of the autocrat's tomb immediately after the 1979 revolution. 
 
 Yet, as disaffection and economic problems grow ahead of the Islamic Revolution's 40th anniversary, mystique around Iran's age of monarchies persists even with its own history of abuses. 
 
 Reza Shah's grandson, the U.S.-based exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, already tweeted about it as forensic experts in Iran try to determine whose body they found. 
 
 Construction workers discovered the mummified remains while working at the Shiite shrine of Abdul Azim, whose minarets once rose behind Reza Shah's own mausoleum. A digger pulling away dirt and debris uncovered the body, according to the semi-official ISNA news agency. 
 
 Pictures of the body, as well as construction workers posing with it, quickly ricocheted across social media in Iran. 
 
 A spokesman for the shrine dismissed the idea of a mummy being found there. However, Hassan Khalilabadi, the head of Tehran City Council's cultural heritage and tourism committee, was quoted by the state-run IRNA news agency on Monday that it's "possible" the mummy is the body of Reza Shah. 
 
 Authorities say they'll need to conduct DNA tests to confirm whose body it is. 
 
 State television has yet to report on the find, likely due to complications that mentioning the Pahlavis can entail. 
 
 State media typically refer to the Persian dynasties, including the Pahlavis, as "despotic," focusing on the abuses of the monarchy's feared SAVAK intelligence agency and their once-lavish lifestyles. 
 
 Reza Shah's own rise gave birth to modern Iran itself, then still called Persia until he ordered foreign diplomats to cease using the name. He came to power in 1925, ruling as an absolute autocrat who used taxes and the country's burgeoning oil revenues to rapidly modernize the nation. 
 
 His decisions echo today, particularly his 1936 decree banning women from wearing long, flowing black robes known as chadors. He ordered men to wear Western clothes and bring their wives to public functions with their hair uncovered, borrowing from the secularization of Turkey's first President Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, a contemporary. 
 
 The ban became a source of humiliation for some pious Muslim women in the country. Shiite clerics, angry over his secular beliefs, purges and mass arrests of opponents, held grudges that would foment the coming revolution. Controversies over the chador and hijab persist in Iran today . 
 
 Iran's strong trade ties with Germany, Reza Shah's push for neutrality amid the coming of World War II and Western fears over its oil supplies falling to the Nazis ultimately sparked a Russian-British invasion of the country in 1941. Reza Shah abdicated in favor of his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, at the insistence of the occupying British forces. 
 
 Reza Shah ended up in South Africa, dying there in 1944. His body was taken to Cairo, mummified and held for years before returning to Iran. A grand mausoleum near Tehran held his body for years, which then-President Richard Nixon visited in 1972. 
 
 After 1979, however, Islamists viewed the mausoleum as an affront. 
 
 Iranian cleric Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkhali, who ordered the executions of hundreds after the revolution, led a mob of supporters who used sledgehammers, jack hammers and other tools to demolish the mausoleum. 
 
 Khalkhali later would write in his memoirs that he believed the shah's family took Reza Shah's body when they fled the country. The shah's family, however, maintained the body remained in Iran. His son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was buried in Cairo after dying of cancer in 1980. 
 
 Today, Iran's youth remain fascinated by the time before the revolution. Television period pieces have focused on the Pahlavi dynasty, including the recent state TV series "The Enigma of the Shah," the most expensive series ever produced to air in the country. While incorporating romances or mobsters into the tales, all shows uniformly criticize the royal court. 
 
 Reza Shah's grandson, Reza Pahlavi, has seen his profile rise following the election of President Donald Trump, who appears to hold the future of the Iran nuclear deal in the balance. From exile, the crown prince has agitated for an end to Iran's theocracy — though gauging national sentiment about restoring the monarchy remains impossible. 
 
 Pahlavi took to Twitter on Monday night to tell Iranian officials he is watching what they will do next with the body. 
 
 "I warn the responsible authorities not to hide anything," he wrote. 
 
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 Follow Jon Gambrell on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jongambrellap . His work can be found at http://apne.ws/2galNpz .
– The youngest son of the late shah of Iran killed himself in his Boston home this morning, his family says. Alireza Pahlavi, 44, apparently shot himself, reports the Globe. “Like millions of young Iranians, he too was deeply disturbed by all the ills fallen upon his beloved homeland, as well as carrying the burden of losing a father and a sister in his young life," said a family statement. It refers to his sister Leila, who died of a drug overdose in 2001. Pahlavi's father, an American ally, was overthrown in 1979 and died the following year in exile in Egypt. A family friend says Alireza Pahlavi never recovered from the death of his sister and that his depression "grew over time," reports AP. He had studied music and history at Princeton, then did postgraduate work at Harvard. He kept a relatively low-key profile, unlike his brother Reza Pahlavi, a US attorney who frequently speaks out against the Iran regime. Click for more on Alireza Pahlavi.