Russian scientist Nikita Zezin, 67, beaten after confronting children on ATVs, has died. Investigators have opened a criminal case against the father who attacked him for scolding his son.

The Investigative Committee’s regional office said it had opened a criminal case in the beating of Nikita Zezin, a 67-year-old scientist in Yekaterinburg who died in a hospital on July 22. The Investigative Committee did not specify which article of the Criminal Code the case falls under.

Zezin was the director of the Ural Federal Agricultural Research Center, part of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Vyacheslav Vegner, a lawmaker in the Sverdlovsk region’s legislative assembly, described the beating in a social media post.

According to Vegner, Zezin and his deputy, Alexander Shanin, were inspecting experimental fields and crops on July 13 when they spotted children ages 8 to 10 in one of the fields, riding all-terrain vehicles that had gotten stuck in the ground. The children had been “racing across the crops and destroying them,” Vegner wrote.

The two men approached the children and asked for their parents’ phone numbers. They called the parents, told them the children were alone in the field with their vehicles stuck in the mud, and said the two of them would drive the children to the center and hand them over to their parents there.

Around 6 p.m., four SUVs pulled up to the center. Two “athletic-looking types, one of whom introduced himself as Arkasha,” got out of one of the vehicles, and that man began beating Zezin, according to Vegner, and that man began beating Zezin.

“The whole scene was accompanied by shouting and threats,” Vegner writes. “Children stood close by, watching the beating unfold, and cheered happily, delighted by their enraged father’s actions.” At one point, Zezin nearly lost consciousness. After that, according to the account, “they set upon Shanin, spitting in the face of a combat veteran — a veteran of the war in Afghanistan.”

Some time after the beating, Zezin died. According to Vegner, the scientist’s “heart gave out.” Telegram channels with ties to the security services, Baza and 112, report that the official cause of death was a heart attack, though people close to Zezin believe the beating triggered it.

Zezin was a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and held a doctorate in agricultural sciences. According to the Yekaterinburg news outlet E1.ru, at Zezin’s initiative and with his direct involvement, researchers in the Urals resumed studying corn cultivation and began breeding winter triticale, a hybrid of rye and wheat. He was the author of 260 scholarly works, monographs, and books.