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She'd tell him, time and again: Don't walk at night. The place has changed. It's not safe. They'd been married, though, for 44 years. After a certain point, it wasn't really a conversation; it was like a song they'd played a thousand times, enjoyed more for routine than anything else.

"Ne perezhivaitye," he'd tell her. "Don't worry."

He left their little apartment in West Hollywood at 9 p.m. March 9, a Sunday, walking out past a bookshelf full of all the dictionaries required of a Kazakhstani in L.A.: one in English, one in Russian, a Russian-to-English, a Spanish-to-English.

Katan Khaimov was a 70-year-old diabetic, but he was in great shape. He often walked for an hour or more, so his family didn't worry at first. But when 11 p.m. passed, his wife, Tamara, went looking for him.

On the west side of Poinsettia Park, below Santa Monica Boulevard, she pulled her car next to an intersection that had been cordoned off with yellow crime-scene tape.

"What happened here?" she asked a police officer.

"Who are you?" he said.

"I'm looking for my husband."

The fact that Khaimov was slain has been hard enough for his neighborhood to accept. But the awful coda of his life has added to the soul-searching. Neighbors, it turns out, heard him dying -- crying for help after being stabbed in the stomach -- for more than an hour before anyone called the police.

Officials say several residents in Khaimov's neighborhood, which straddles the cities of West Hollywood and Los Angeles, believed his moans were the sounds of a vagrant. Cars also passed by while he was lying next to the street, still alive, his head and one arm flopped over the curb.

"Nobody cared," said his 26-year-old daughter, Olga, the youngest of his four children. "To think that people didn't answer a man's cries for help. . . . Even if it is a bum. So what? Call the cops. It's a person, a human being."

There have been no arrests. Khaimov was not robbed, and police have declined to speculate about what might have motivated his attacker. It's unclear how many people saw or heard Khaimov that night, and it's unclear whether he could have been saved had he been taken to a hospital earlier.

Regardless, there is a sense here that Khaimov was failed, somehow.

"It is a shocking thing that nobody went out to help," said 47-year-old Paul Lerner, a public safety advocate and a healthcare marketing consultant who has lived in the area for five years.

The neighborhood has long fancied itself something of an urban tribe, where Russian-speaking Jews like Khaimov shared the narrow, leafy streets and the boxy apartment buildings with fixed-income seniors, club-hopping hipsters and young gays.

It was never going to be mistaken for Mayberry, but it was -- or was supposed to be -- a place where people took care of one another. A place where, on your nightly constitutional, you might encounter misfits and oddballs, but not murderers.

Katan Khaimov and his family lived in a house he built with his father in a factory village in Kazakhstan, north of the Uzbekistan capital of Tashkent. He was the head of an engineering company and helped oversee the construction of gymnasiums and hospitals, but it was not enough.

"The way it worked was that you did not get paid well unless you stole. And he was an honest man," Olga Khaimova said. When the United States offered his family immigration visas in 1995, he jumped at the chance.

"He moved here for us," Olga Khaimova said.

He pushed the value of hard work and education on his four children. It worked -- two grown daughters, who now live in Israel, are a music teacher and a doctor; Olga's brother is a pharmacist; and Olga is studying to become a nurse practitioner.