Ilya Gerasimenko was chatting with friends outside a supermarket when a bullet blasted through his skull. Gerasimenko, an 18-year-old student, was conscious long enough to see the gunman, a man named Denis Yevsyukov.
Yevsyukov killed two people that night in April and wounded seven in an unprovoked rampage that shocked Russia, where mass shootings are rare. The public seemed far less surprised, though, to learn of Yevsyukov’s occupation: He was a major in the police force and the chief of a Moscow precinct.
For many Russians, including top officials, Yevsyukov’s shootings have come to symbolize a systemic crisis in Russian law enforcement, making the issue of police criminality — already an ever-present, if largely unaddressed, fact of life in this country — almost impossible to ignore.
“Everyone thinks the police should protect civilians, but here this is not the case,” said Gerasimenko, who survived the attack, even though one bullet shattered his jaw and exited through the bridge of his nose, while another lodged close to his heart. “I can’t bear to even see them.”
After the shootings, Russian officials declared that they would move quickly to address the troubled Moscow police force, and President Dmitri Medvedev took the unusual step of firing Moscow’s police chief, Vladimir Pronin.
Several other high-ranking Moscow police officials were also fired. Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev, whose ministry oversees the police, vowed to impose tougher psychological-health requirements on officers, among other measures.
But critics of the government say that the rot in law enforcement runs deep, and that the new measures hardly scratch the surface.
“The police have turned into an organization that has its own criminal interests, has its own criminal influence,” said Igor Trunov, a prominent human rights lawyer representing some of Yevsyukov’s victims, including Gerasimenko. “It differs from criminal groups in that police carry weapons legally.”
In most Western countries, Yevsyukov, 32, would be considered a rogue officer, but in Russia he is widely viewed as the unfortunate product of the broken police force to which he belonged.
Yevsyukov had a history of disciplinary problems, former colleagues told the Russian media, and last year he sprayed tear gas in a restaurant after becoming intoxicated and had to be forcibly removed from the premises. A month before the shootings, the police labor union accused him of abusing officers and appealed unsuccessfully to Pronin to fire him.
Nevertheless, Yevsyukov rose rapidly through the ranks, and some Russian news reports described him as a protege of Pronin, who shortly after the attacks praised the officer as “a good professional.”
“The more details from the biography of Yevsyukov that emerge, the more clearly you understand that this person is a quintessential example of the corruption and lawlessness of the police,” the commentator Yuri Bogomolov wrote in a column published on the Ria Novosti news agency’s Web site. “He is not a deviation from the norm, but the norm itself.”
Yevsyukov spent the evening before the shootings celebrating his birthday at a Moscow cafe, according to investigators. For reasons that are still unclear, Yevsyukov left the cafe intoxicated, went home and put his uniform jacket on over his civilian clothing. He also grabbed a Makarov 9mm pistol.
Shortly after midnight on April 27, Yevsyukov stalked the aisles of the Ostrov supermarket in southern Moscow for 50 minutes, shooting randomly at employees and customers, his every move caught on surveillance cameras.
“We were standing there, chatting, and were getting ready to leave,” Gerasimenko said. “And then we saw a policeman coming. He came up very calmly, but one of the girls, Luiza, noticed that he was wobbling as he walked. And then he started shooting.”
Yevsyukov fired at least 15 shots before a police unit called to the scene subdued him, wrestling the gun from his hands, according to the official police account. Sergei Yevteyev, a taxi driver, who had driven Yevsyukov to the supermarket, and Elmira Turdayeva, a cashier, were killed.
In the aftermath of the shootings, even Nurgaliyev has expressed concern at criminality in the police force, saying on July 30 that police misconduct was widespread.
Recent inspections of police departments “uncovered gross violations of the law,” Nurgaliyev told a meeting of top Interior Ministry officials on July 30. “These violations bring to naught the efforts of thousands of our colleagues, who risk their lives to guard public order.”
Clearly, the vast majority of crimes carried out by police officers do not reach the viciousness of Yevsyukov’s. Most involve bribe-taking, which regularly affects Russians, who are subject to document checks on the streets or surprise inspections at work from officers seeking kickbacks for minor violations, real or contrived. Just before the attacks in April, a detective from Yevsyukov’s department was charged with demanding an US$890,000 bribe from a local businessman.
A failure to hold the police accountable has contributed to an atmosphere of mistrust that surrounds Russian law enforcement agencies, experts said.
Nurgaliyev vowed shortly after the attacks that he and his ministry would do “anything in our power” for the victims. Gerasimenko has yet to receive any government support for his rehabilitation, he and his family say.
“We haven’t received one kopek,” said Muslim Gerasimenko, Ilya’s father. He said the Interior Ministry promised to send his son to a ministry center specializing in gunshot wounds, but announced at the last minute that there would be a fee for the treatment. (Gerasimenko needs another operation to remove the bullet in his chest.)
The Gerasimenkos filed a civil suit for about US$160,000 against the government on the grounds that Yevsyukov was a government employee. A judge turned down the suit on July 29; the crime, he argued, was committed by citizen Yevsyukov, not Major Yevsyukov.
Police officials will not reveal the whereabouts of Yevsyukov, who has not been seen publicly since his arrest. Officially, he is said to be undergoing psychological testing at an undisclosed location, but the victims’ lawyers worry that he could be wrongfully declared insane, preventing him from giving testimony that could be damaging to the Interior Ministry.
“I hope that he gets life in prison,” Ilya Gerasimenko said. “If he’s found unfit to stand trial, how was such a person found fit to head an entire precinct?”
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