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By the time this goes to press, you'll have undoubtedly heard that three 19-year-olds in Dnepropetrovsk (or, in Kiev expat lingvo, DP) killed 19 people in the last month. You also probably thought, wow, that's a lot of symmetry: A vicious DP in DP; 19-year-olds, 19 victims. But before you start seeing occult significance in these numbers, the real reason the teens did it was shits and giggles. As one of them put it, "It was for entertainment." That's right, folks, there appears to be absolutely nothing behind this except for the fact that there's not a lot to do in DP over the summer. We can just imagine the conversation leading up to the decision to kill 19 strangers: "Ey, Vas?" "Cho, blya?" "Cho budim delat', blya?" "Davai ubyom kogo-to na khui, blya'." "Nu, cho, blya. Davai. Blya." So, on June 25, the three former classmates started cruising the oblast looking for some passersbys to kill. Their weapons of choice were rods and (in a nod to DP's expansive metal industry) pipes filled with sand. The assaults were more or less all the same: They pounced on an unsuspecting pedestrian and beat him or her to a bloody pulp. By the time they finished, the victim's skull would be so mangled as to be totally unrecognizable, even the teeth destroyed. Several victims were identified solely by their clothes. Sometimes they'd steal the victim's phone and money. Sometimes they'd just scram. Amazingly, there was virtually no pattern to the crimes, other than the fact that all the killings took place in the same oblast. They were just as happy to bludgeon a bomzh as a girl coming home late from her institute. So far, among the victims, the police have identified a 14-year-old boy, a 17-year-old girl, and a couple of geezers aged 50 to 60. According to deputy interior minister Nikolai Kupyansky, "they weren't interested in social status, age or sex." They just killed. And killed and killed and killed. Even though the Ukrainian militsia caught several of the attacks on film and supposedly had over 2,000 men working the case, it took nearly a month to track down and identify the perps. In that time, they worked up a good average: nearly a victim a day.
Another thing to marvel at is that the kids were apparently members of the middle class. We were expecting either glue-sniffing ZEK orphans or a Salnikov-type with a God complex. Nope. These guys' parents, according to Kupyansky, "were well-off, honored citizens." One of the 19-year-olds worked as an okhranik, while the others were unemployed. They've confessed to 19 killings so far, and the militsia is trying to figure out if the gang "practiced" on anyone before their June mass murder spree. And to think that we were just beginning to whine that Russia's DP cases have been on the slide, unable to compete with the juicy Palm Beach rape case, in which 10 kids aged 14 to 17 gang raped a Haitian woman, forced her to suck off her 12-year-old son, and then doused them with ammonia to "get rid of the evidence." Boy were we wrong! Russia (and Ukraine) can still turn it up to 11 when they need to! (Oh, and after being run on a wire service, , as expected, the DP 19 has failed to drum up any media coverage.) Casablanca  Some uses aren't featured on the infomercial Of all the Death Porns in all the towns in all the Republics, this is the first one ever to have a protagonist named Victor Lazlo. Did his parents have the Nazi-defying Czech freedom fighter of Casablanca in mind when Vic popped out 22 years ago in the Ukrainian town Svalyav? We'll never know, as his father died last year and his mother ran away with a lover long ago. He did have at least one thing in common with the guy who ended up with Ilsa, though. Many try to make the pages of Death Porn, but Victor succeeded.
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