Ukrainians Breathe Easier After Arrest

By NANCY VOGEL

Aug. 31, 2001 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

RANCHO CORDOVA, Calif. — On the lawn outside a duplex where police say Nikolay Soltys stabbed four relatives to death 10 days ago, Galina Ganzyuk dropped to her knees and raised her clasped hands to the sky.

Tears welled in her eyes at the news that Soltys, a fugitive hunted across the nation, had been arrested.

“Praise God,” said Ganzyuk. “Praise God.”

Relief burst like a collective sigh from Sacramento County’s large Ukrainian immigrant community Thursday morning after sheriff’s deputies captured the 27-year-old suspected killer. He was in the backyard of his mother’s home in Citrus Heights, a small city carved out of Sacramento’s eastern suburbs.

In the neighborhoods to the north and east of Sacramento that have become home to 70,000 Slavic immigrants, many of them Pentecostal Christians, Soltys’ alleged rampage and escape left people terrified. Soltys is accused of killing his son, wife, aunt, uncle and two young cousins. Fellow immigrants called him a devil, a maniac, a wolf who smelled blood.

Some young men in this community had taken to sleeping with a baseball bat at bedside, and old women kept watch at their windows. Now, they said, they hoped to recover the restful nights lost Aug. 20.

“My wife, she doesn’t sleep,” said Gennadiy Ostashenko, a security guard who lives in North Highlands, another suburb, across the street from the duplex where police believe Soltys began a murderous rampage by stabbing to death his 22-year-old wife, Lyubov.

“Everybody was worried about him,” said Oksana Pchelkina, 18. She lives several miles away, on the same block in Rancho Cordova where Soltys allegedly went to turn his knife on his uncle and aunt, Petr Kukharskiy, 75, and Galina Kukharskaya, 74, then killing his cousins Dimitriy Kukharskiy and Tatyana Kukharskaya, both 9.

“You didn’t know if he was going to come,” Pchelkina said.

Since the killings, a Sacramento County sheriff’s patrol car has been parked in front of the Rancho Cordova duplex. An impromptu shrine spreads across the driveway, with dozens of teddy bears and stuffed rabbits, lions and tigers.

“May God richly bless you in your time of pain,” someone had written in marker on a piece of cardboard among the flowers and toys.

Besides erasing the fear of more violence, Slavic immigrants said they hoped that Soltys’ capture would switch off the national spotlight, which they feared made Americans equate their community with murderous behavior.

“I think that most in the Ukrainian community are afraid of American society looking at them from the point of view that all Ukrainians are violating laws,” said Tamara Kut, 24, who came to the United States 10 years ago and recently graduated from nursing school in Sacramento. “We feel the pain for this family.”

N.Y. Enclave Upset at Murderous Image

Such worries resonated far beyond the Slavic enclave.

In Binghamton, N.Y., about 1,000 Evangelicals from former Soviet countries, including Ukraine, have settled since 1988. Soltys lived there with his parents before moving to Sacramento a year ago.

They are isolated physically and emotionally, and having a fellow Ukrainian identified as a killer doesn’t help their self-esteem, they say.

Nadia Ponizhaylo, whose parents lived next door to the Soltys family, says the community can’t get the young man out of its mind.

“Everyone is so scared here,” she said hours before his capture. “Even if he has no reason to come back, who knows what he could do? After that crazy business in California, who can say what is on his mind?”

Ponizhaylo said that many in the community are now embarrassed to admit they are Ukrainian. “The day the killings hit the newspapers, someone at my husband’s work said, ‘Hey, where do you come from?’ He was almost ashamed to say [Ukraine]. But when he did, the person said, ‘Isn’t that where that killer is from?’ ”

“We Ukrainian Pentecostals are religious people,” she said. “We fled our homeland because we were persecuted. Now one of our people does something horrible like this. What does that say about us? I don’t know.”

Many fellow immigrants dismiss Soltys’ behavior as that of a crazy man, and they have rallied to help his surviving family. Sacramento County Sheriff Lou Blanas offered proof that many other Sacramentans feel similar compassion.

At a news conference Thursday afternoon, Blanas said Soltys’ cousin Boris Kukharskiy and his wife, Zoya Kukharskaya, ran a food truck from which they sold coffee, doughnuts and sandwiches. While the couple were in protective custody for most of the last 10 days, guarded by sheriff’s deputies, they could not work their route. And they worried that a competitor would usurp their business.

Soltys’ arrest freed them to resume work, said Blanas, and “as soon as they got into their truck and started their work, people came out and greeted them the American way, with open arms.”

“They thanked them for returning to work and told them that every time another truck drove up they ran them off, and they wouldn’t buy anything from them,” he said.

“So I’ve got to salute the citizens of Sacramento County,” Blanas said, “for supporting this family through their tragedy.”

Times staff writers John Glionna in New York and Virginia Ellis and Eric Bailey in Sacramento contributed to this story.