‘This question is for a grade’ A Moscow teenager is sentenced to psychiatric treatment for a school shooting

On March 3, 2015, Moscow’s Butyrsky court sentenced a teenager to compulsory treatment at a psychiatric hospital. The boy, whose name cannot be legally released because he is under the age of 18, was convicted of carrying out a deadly shooting spree at his school in north Moscow’s Otryadnoye region. Some of the victims’ families, unsatisfied with the sentence, have demanded what they consider to be a “real punishment.” As a juvenile, however, the boy’s prison sentence cannot exceed ten years. While some parents say they intend to appeal the court’s ruling in an effort to get a longer sentence, others have grown tired of the trial and will abandon the legal process. Meduza’s Ilya Rozhdestvensky went to the region in northeast Moscow to learn more about the tragic school shooting.

On the morning of February 3, 2014, the 15-year-old boy told his parents that he would only be attending his fourth period class that day because the others had been canceled. He then waited for his parents to leave the apartment with his little brother, who was in kindergarten at the time. Once he was alone, he took a souvenir dagger that had been a gift to his father, as well as two firearms: a Saiga carbine and a small caliber, semi-automatic Browning rifle. Donning one of his mother’s fur coats, he hid the weapons under his clothes, along with nearly 100 rounds of ammunition. Pulling a hood over his head, he then left the apartment to go to school No. 263. As he entered the building around 11 a.m., he ran into the school’s security guard.

“I don’t have anything against you. I’m looking for the geography teacher,” the young man said, aiming one of his weapons at the security guard. Held at gunpoint, the guard let the young man pass and then ran to trigger the school’s alarm.

The teenager walked down the first floor corridor and entered a classroom where a tenth-grade geography lesson was in progress. The teacher, Andrei Kirillov, began to move towards the young man, but was shot in the stomach. The bullet passed through his body, through a window, and into the street. According to eyewitnesses, the first shot wasn’t fatal.

The teenager stood over his wounded victim and began to ask his classmates whether or not the teacher was dead.

“This question is for a grade,” he allegedly said, as if he were now the teacher, adding, “Why is he still breathing? Didn’t I kill him?”

None of the students responded.

“You all get a D,” the shooter said, unsatisfied with their silence, and shot Kirillov in the head.

By this point, a group of private security guards had entered the school. Two of the guards, Sergei Bushuyev and Vladimir Krokhin, rushed the classroom. Bushuyev was killed on the spot, at the doorway, while Krokhin was seriously wounded, shot as many as five times. The surviving sergeant testified that the guards did not open fire during their assault for fear that they might endanger the other children in the room.

Police reinforcements arrived and began clearing the rest of the school. For the most part, the evacuation went smoothly, except for one seventh-grade teacher who literally barricaded himself in his classroom. Students were moved to a nearby building.

Special police forces began to arrive at the school, as snipers took up positions on the roofs of neighboring buildings. Law enforcement officials called the shooter’s father to request his assistance in negotiations. Meanwhile inside the building, the shooter told his classmates that he wouldn’t kill any of them, as he needed them as human shields. He soon began to threaten his hostages, however, and witnesses recall how his voice trembled and his hands were shaking. He began to question whether he was in a dream or reality. The shooter told his hostages that he’d “had enough of this life,” and wanted to see what waited after death.

Later, the boy’s lawyer, Vladimir Levin, claimed that the teenager had been introduced to solipsism, a philosophical idea positing that one’s own mind is the sole source of true knowledge. According to the defense attorney, as the boy began to study this philosophy, he became increasingly disillusioned with life.

Back in the classroom, students sent their parents SMS messages begging for help as the hostage-taker continued his monologue. Soon the young offender’s father managed to reach him by telephone. The boy’s father managed to persuade him to release his hostages and give himself up to the police. According to investigators’ original explanation, the boy had suffered an emotional breakdown. Some of his classmates told police they thought it might have happened because he’d received a B in the geography class. According to the other students, the gunman had been working exceptionally hard to be top of the class, cramming late into the night at home and learning by heart many of the lessons. They believe the boy’s failure to ace the class may have triggered his breakdown. Igor Trunov, the lawyer representing the victims, agrees with this assessment.

Trunov’s previous experience representing victims is extensive. He was an advocate for the victims in the infamous Dubrovka theatre hostage crisis in 2002, also known as the “Nord-Ost siege.”

“When I asked the father, ‘Why did you take your son to the shooting range to shoot at cans,’ he asked me if he should have taken his son to ballet instead,” Trunov told Meduza’s correspondent.

“That’s the mentality of the father—that ballet is something shameful and that a boy should be interested in weapons. We questioned one of the instructors at the shooting range, who told us that during just one visit, this boy fired over 150 rounds himself. This is why I believe that, as soon as the boy began to experience stress, his first instinct was to reach for a weapon. The parents are to blame for instilling a love of weapons in him and teaching him how to shoot straight.”

During one of the boy’s first interrogations he said he’d become tired of life. “I’m afraid of death, but I’m interested to know what it looks like,” the boy told police.

He was then sent to the Serbskiy Institute for psychological analysis, which revealed that he suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. The records of his examinations provide a picture of the boy’s worldview: “A person, who has created everything and is practically God, cannot obey anyone,” the boy told physicians. “So how can these illusions possibly command me?”

The psychiatrist’s conclusions have infuriated the victims’ families. According to Trunov, the psychological examination of the shooter was illegitimate, insofar as it was conducted without a signed document from the physician acknowledging criminal liability for false testimony. (This signature was obtained only after the psychological examination.) Trunov also says the victims were not informed about the examination in advance, otherwise they would have had a number of questions for the doctors. Trunov is convinced there is something “corrupt” about the way psychological experts handled the case.

The teenager’s attorney, Vladimir Levin, finds these claims surprising.

“If [Trunov] keeps talking like that, he’s going to attract some psychiatrists of his own,” Levin said. “This all started because of [the boy’s] theory of solipsism. He thinks all these imaginary people he dislikes simply disappear when he closes his eyes. He believes that his own mother is an illusion. He thought that by shooting people he was sending them to a better world.”

The victims and their families, however, are pushing back against the boy’s insanity defense.

“This is an unfortunate child who was trying to attract the attention of his parents,” said Elena Bushuyeva, widow of one of the killed security guards. “And he chose such a horrible way to do it.”

“The court, by recognizing him as insane, is granting him an escape route,” said Nadezhda Kirillova, the mother of the murdered teacher. “They’ll examine him and, in six months, they’ll transfer him to an out-patient clinic. That will be the end of his sentence. He won’t be guilty of anything; he won’t have taken anybody hostage, and those two people he killed—it will all have been just an accident. He’ll get his treatment and then he’ll be on his way. That’s our state for you: bribes and money.”

The parents of the boy didn’t attend their son’s sentencing. They weren’t in court a year ago, either, when he was first arrested and jailed. The teenager had to accept state-appointed legal aid—a teacher and an employee from the local social services office. The police investigator in the case told the court that the boy’s parents had absolved themselves of responsibility for their son and refused to participate in his fate, though they later changed their minds and hired Levin as his attorney.

Levin says the parents were in shock during the early days of the case, and had become the “object of harassment by journalists.” After this initial period, they attended all the hearings, which, except for the sentencing, are closed to the public by law.

Answering the questions of Judge Julia Shelepova, the boy’s father said his son didn’t have an attraction to weapons. He claimed that he had no idea his son was seriously ill, though he did recall hearing him mention a phrase about the “illusory nature of existence.” The father himself is now under investigation, and has been been charged with negligent storage of a firearm. The same day he was charged, the father resigned from his job at the research institute Ether. According to the newspaper Izvestia, this institute is a front for one of the Russian Interior Ministry’s surveillance divisions.