Suspect in Stabbings of 5 Relatives Flees

A man with a reported history of violence and mental instability went on a rampage in the capital’s suburbs Monday, killing his wife and four other relatives before fleeing with his 3-year-old son, police said.

Law enforcement officials had launched a nationwide search for Nikolay Soltys, 27, a Ukrainian immigrant described as armed and dangerous.

Late Monday night, a mile from Soltys’ home, authorities found the silver Nissan Altima that he had driven off in 12 hours earlier.

Soltys allegedly stabbed his wife, identified as Lyubov, 27, in their North Highlands duplex. Authorities said he then drove to nearby Rancho Cordova, where they believe he killed an elderly aunt and uncle and two cousins, ages 9 and 10.

Police said they were worried about young Sergey Soltys because the towheaded toddler was last seen with the suspect after the killings, at the home of Nikolay Soltys’ mother in Citrus Heights, another Sacramento suburb.

Soltys’ mother told investigators that her son appeared “calm” as he whisked the boy away.

There was no immediate sign of the boy or his father when deputies found the car at about 10:30 p.m., parked near a House2Home store in the Foothill Farms neighborhood, across Interstate 80 from the North Highlands home Soltys shared with his wife. Authorities were searching the area with dogs and helicopters.

They said they are trying to find other relatives. Sacramento County Sheriff’s Sgt. James Lewis said Soltys may have family in Oregon, and could be headed there.

By late Monday, as sheriff’s deputies scoured the two modest duplexes for clues, there were more questions than answers about the troubled family and the tragedy that befell them. The killer’s rage was evident, but a motive was not.

Lewis underscored the urgency of finding Soltys, noting that even in crimes of passion, multiple murders usually occur in a single spot. For the killer “to carry that rage to a secondary location speaks to what danger we’re dealing with here,” he said.

Language barriers made investigating the crime even more difficult. The Sacramento area has one of California’s largest concentrations of recent Slavic immigrants, many of whom speak little English.

Both neighborhoods where the victims died are made up largely Russian and Ukrainian immigrants. The sheriff’s department deployed Russian-speaking officers to the scenes, but Capt. John McGinness nevertheless described the communication problems as “huge.”

“There are some cultural differences” compounding the problems, he said. Chief among them is a suspicion of law enforcement officials, bred during life in the former Soviet Union.

The first 911 call came at 9:40 a.m., when a neighbor across the street from the Soltys’ neat gray duplex reported an assault, then a possible dead body.

Lyubov, who neighbors and friends said was three months pregnant, was apparently stabbed in her home. She ran out her front door past the duplex’s twin garages and lunged at her neighbors’ front window, pushing in the screen. She stumbled into their home and died. Her body was still there in the late afternoon.

Neighbor Olga Kopets, who spoke Monday with the family sharing the Soltys’ duplex, said they described Nikolay chasing the terrified Lyubov, stabbing her repeatedly as she raced for safety. Her throat had been cut. One family member brandished a chair at the attacker and shouted, “What are you doing? What are you doing?”

A Second Call, a Second Slaying Scene

Nikolay was gone by the time deputies arrived, according to witnesses. As authorities began investigating Lyubov’s death, the dispatch center received a second call.

This one came from Rancho Cordova, and was originally transferred to the Fire Department as a report of a young girl lying in the street, victim of auto accident. When emergency vehicles arrived, they found a 9-year-old with stab wounds.

Apparently the girl, whose name has not been released, had been attacked in the house and was able to drag herself into the street, where she collapsed. Janet Dolan, a spokeswoman for UC Davis Medical Center, said the girl arrived there at 11:30 a.m. and was pronounced dead seven minutes later.

She was not the only one to die in the second attack. Authorities found a 10-year-old boy, her cousin, dead on the concrete front porch of the duplex. The children lived on one side with their parents.

Neighbors Nadezhda and Victor Shostak were returning home at 10:30 a.m. from a doctor’s appointment when they came upon the grisly scene, said their son Alex, 18.

Others were huddled around the girl in the middle of Mills Station Road. The boy’s mother was holding his motionless body, screaming for help. His throat had been slashed.

Alex Shostak said his mother raced into their home for towels to staunch the bleeding. By the time she returned, the boy was dead.

The boy’s mother spent Monday night lying down at a friend’s house. “All she does,” Shostak said, “is look up at the ceiling, saying nothing, responding to no one. She’s in shock.”

The dead children’s grandparents--Nikolay Solty’s elderly aunt and uncle--lived on the other side of the duplex. Their bodies were found on the second floor. Lewis, of the Sheriff’s Department, said “there was a significant amount of blood.” Other authorities said the couple were stabbed to death.

The Sheriff’s Department did not release the couple’s names, but an employee of their church identified them as Peter and Galina Kuhraskiy, who had emigrated from the village of Shumsk in Ukraine in 1996.

A pastor from the Bethany Slavic Missionary church had visited Soltys and his wife on Sunday, but said he did not notice any problems between them. The church is believed to be the biggest Russian Pentecostal church in the country, with 3,700 members.

Soltys had tried to join the church about a month ago, according to church secretary Valentin Kalinovskiy, but the congregation held off admitting him because he was vague about the circumstances of his departure from his last church.

Sheriff’s chaplain Frank Russell said “domestic violence was very much part of the picture” in Soltys’ family. Lyubov had waited until five months ago to join her husband in the United States because of fears that the abuse she suffered previously would begin again, Russell said.

Family members also told Russell that Nikolay had been found unfit for military duty in his former home, apparently because of mental instability.

Neighbors described the family as quiet people. Soltys, who worked for a janitorial service, apparently moved to New York two years ago and to Sacramento in recent months. He had signed up to take classes at American River College, a local junior college and was to begin Monday. Lyubov was to start work at a Russian grocery store the day she died.

Marsha Borisova, 19, worked at the Good Neighbors market where Lyubov had trained for two days last week, and had known the couple for about three years.

Through a store clerk who served as interpreter, she said their marriage was known to be troubled. She said her brothers had beaten Nikolay up over a dispute between husband and wife.

In fact, Borisova said, “no one is sure why” the wife came to the United States to be closer to Soltys. But she said she had never heard that Soltys had shown violent tendencies toward his wife.

In the tightknit ethnic communities hit hard by Monday’s killings, neighbors said what neighbors often say when their worlds go terribly awry: They didn’t see it coming. The family was so nice. Maybe they were poor and not that happy, but this? Never.

Nikolay “seemed like a nice guy,” said Oleg Bogush, 19, who lives across the street from the extended family in Rancho Cordova. “They were just nice, quiet people. They were all Christians” who left their homeland to escape religious persecution.

Said Maggie Polhemus, who lived across the street from the Soltys family: “I would be out watering when I’d see them. We’d nod and wave, but never a word. She was a pretty young woman. She had so much more there, so many years to go.”

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Times staff writers Maria L. La Ganga, Carl Ingram, Miguel Bustillo and Tina Daunt in Sacramento and Bettina Boxall and Robin Fields in Los Angeles contributed to this story.

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