Not long afterwards, he served in the military and was stationed in Gorgan, a city in Mazanderan, a northern province of Iran near the Caspian Sea, where he established a house church.

In 1969 Hovsepian, his wife and their six-month-old child were driving from Tehran to Gorgan with an American missionary family, when their car struck an unlit tractor-trailer.

While the government initially denied all involvement, Iranian Christians and independent observers claimed that he was murdered for his beliefs.

Lord Ennals and Viscount Brentford, House of Lords, 3rd March 1994[3]On July 5, 1994, a few days after 1994 Imam Reza shrine bomb explosion, and months after Hovsepian Mehr's murder two women who were allegedly from People's Mujahedin of Iran and were going to bomb Mausoleum of Ruhollah Khomeini and Fatima Masumeh Shrine were arrested.

[4] Abdelfattah Amor, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the question of religious intolerance made a visit to Iran in 1995 where he was able to speak freely in Evin prison with the women charged with murder of Hovsepian Mehr and two other Christian leaders.

Amor concluded in his UN report that the Iranian Government had apparently decided to execute Bishop Hovsepian Mehr and two other Christian leaders in order not only to discredit the Mujahedin organization by declaring it responsible for those crimes, but also, to decapitate the Protestant community.

[5] Takoosh and her four children (Rebekkah, Joseph, Gilbert, and Andre) eventually migrated to California, to be surrounded by a large diaspora of Armenians and Persians, including family members and friends from Tehran.