WINDSOR HILLS, Calif. (KABC) — A somber vigil was held Friday evening to honor the victims of a multi-vehicle crash in Windsor Hills that killed six people, including a pregnant woman who died along with her young son.
Asherey Ryan was on her way to a prenatal doctor’s appointment at the time of the fiery collision on Thursday, her sister Seana Kerr told ABC7. Ryan’s 11-month-old son Alonzo Quintero and her boyfriend, Reynold Lester, were also among the deceased victims.
“Everybody’s heartbroken,” Kerr said in an interview. “She literally walked out the door, because we all live together, and she said, ‘Ok, I love y’all. I’m going to my doctor’s appointment to check up on the baby.’ We asked, ‘Oh, why don’t you leave our nephew here?’ She said, ‘No, I want to take my son for a ride.’ So, knowing that really, really broke our hearts.”
Lester’s family told ABC7 that the 24-year-old security guard was the father of the unborn child, who was listed as “baby boy Ryan” in online coroner’s records.
Two other women and a man were also killed but their names weren’t made public Friday.
Shortly after 1:30 p.m. Thursday, a Mercedes-Benz coupe ran a red light at high speed and caused the crash involving as many as six cars near a gas station at the intersection of Slauson and La Brea avenues, according to the California Highway Patrol.
The California Highway Patrol said 37-year-old Nicole Lorraine Linton, who was injured in the collision, was taken into custody at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Westwood on suspicion of vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence.
Prosecutors said they could receive the case as early as next Monday and will then decide whether to file criminal charges.
“I drove to the scene,” Kerr said. “I ran past the police officers just because I wanted to feel her energy one more time. Yesterday, I truly lost it. My family was broken yesterday, and we’re still broken.”
Alonzo would have turned one-year-old on Aug. 17, his family said.
Ryan was a stay-at-home mother and a student, according to her family.
WATCH | Drivers left in shock after violent Windsor Hills crash kills 6: ‘It could’ve been me’
The Mercedes-Benz coupe never appeared to brake as it flew through the intersection and CHP Officer Franco Pepi said detectives are looking into whether Linton had a medical episode or was driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
Several people were flung from the cars and two vehicles caught fire. News video from the scene showed the charred and mangled cars, as well as a child’s car seat among the debris covering the street.
Surveillance video showed the Mercedes careening through an intersection, striking at least two cars that exploded in flames and were sent hurtling onto a sidewalk, winding up against the gas station’s corner sign. A fiery streak led to one car. One vehicle was torn in half.
The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office released the following statement Friday afternoon:
“My heart goes out to the families that lost loved ones in the horrific car collision that occurred yesterday in Windsor Hills. This incredible tragedy has sent shockwaves throughout Los Angeles and the loss of so many precious lives will have a lasting impact on those that are closest to them.Our office is in close contact with the lead law enforcement agency investigating. A prosecutor has already been assigned and will be working with law enforcement throughout the weekend. We will provide updates as more information becomes available. The case could be presented to us as early as Monday.”
CHICAGO — The body of an man was recovered from Lake Michigan, according to Chicago police.
The man was identified as 29-year-old Spencer Williams. His body was recovered in the 1000 block of North DuSable Lake Shore Drive just after 5 p.m. on Saturday.
No additional details were made available but the Chicago Tribune reports that a boater in the Playpen noticed the victim’s floating body and alerted authorities.
The recovery comes days after Chicago first responder agencies came together to highlight water safety on the lakefront, specifically the Playpen.
Early Thursday morning, a 38-year-old man was pulled from the water near Montrose Beach and died at the hospital.
Wednesday evening, near Navy Pier, WGN News was told someone passed out on a boat and was taken to the hospital in critical condition, while a second person from that boat was still missing in Lake Michigan.
On Wednesday, a man was also found dead in the water near 37th Street.
Also, on Wednesday, a 43-year-old man was found dead after allegedly slipping and falling into the water in Diversey Harbor.
Days earlier, two women were critically injured Saturday in a rafting accident. One suffered severe injuries to her hands and the other, Lana Batochir, had her feet severed. Batochir, a mother of two, has since had three surgeries to amputate both legs 10 inches below the knee.
Olha Havryliuk’s son and son-in-law, along with a stranger, were shot in the head in the yard of their house. The Russian soldiers smashed the Havryliuks’ fence, parked their armored vehicle in the garden, and moved into the house. They cooked in the neighbor’s garden, killing and plucking chickens and roasting them on a barbecue while the men lay dead yards away across the alley.
By the time the troops pulled out at the end of March, two brothers, Yuriy and Viktor Pavlenko, who lived at the end of the street, lay dead in a ditch by the railway line. Volodymyr Cherednychenko was found dead in a neighbor’s cellar. Another man, caught by the Russian soldiers as he ran along the train track and taken into a cellar of a house at the end of the street, was also found shot dead.
The bodies of three civilians in a garden of a house in Bucha on April 4.The property of the Shypilo family in Bucha where six people are thought to have been tortured and killed at one end of Ivana Franka Street.
The story of Bucha and its horrors has unfolded in chapters as new revelations of Russian atrocities emerge, fueling outrage among Ukrainians and across much of the world. But prosecutors and military intelligence officials were investigating early on, collecting evidence to try to identify the perpetrators responsible for the mass killings, torture and rapes in the once tranquil suburb.
Working with war crimes and forensic experts from around the world, Ukrainian investigators have reached some preliminary conclusions, focusing in particular on the 64th Brigade. They have already identified 10 soldiers from the unit and accused them of war crimes.
Ukrainian officials say that the brigade was formed after Russia struggled in a 2008 war with Georgia, and that it was awarded an honorary title by President Vladimir V. Putin last month for its performance in Ukraine.
Yet the brigade took little part in any fighting, coming in after other units had seized control of Bucha and then tasked with “holding” it. The troops established checkpoints throughout the town, parking their armored vehicles in people’s yards and taking over their homes.
“They imprisoned our people,” said Ruslan Kravchenko, the chief prosecutor for the Bucha district, describing the actions of the accused soldiers. “They tied their hands and legs and taped their eyes. They beat them with fists and feet, and with gun butts in the chest, and imitated executions.”
The name of the 64th Brigade and a list of 1,600 of its soldiers were found among computer files left behind in the Russian military headquarters in Bucha, providing investigators with an immense resource as they began their investigation. Dmytro Replianchuk at Slidtsvo.info, a Ukrainian investigative news agency, soon found the social media profiles of dozens of the names, including officers.
Three victims who survived beatings and torture have been able to identify the perpetrators from the photographs, Mr. Kravchenko said.
Ruslan Kravchenko, left, the chief prosecutor for the Bucha district, leading a search in April of a Russian base set up in a boiler room in the suburb.Items left by retreating Russian forces have been collected and cataloged by Mr. Kravchenko and his team.
One of the victims was Yuriy, 50, a factory worker, who lives near one of the most notorious Russian bases, at 144 Yablunska Street. On March 13, a unit of the 64th Brigade came to search his house. He said that he had identified the soldiers when shown photographs by prosecutors. The soldiers were rough and uncouth, he said. “You could see they were from the Taiga,” he said, referring to the Siberian forest. “They just talk to bears.”
Yuriy managed to avoid suspicion, but on March 19, the soldiers returned and detained his neighbor Oleksiy. Like several others interviewed for this article, the men asked to be identified by only their first names for their security.
An investigator identifying empty shell casings in April at a sprawling complex at 144 Yablunska Street, where eight people were executed by Russian forces in early March. The entrance of 144 Yablunska Street. The complex was the site of one of the most notorious documented mass killings in Bucha.
Oleksiy declined to be interviewed but confirmed that he had been detained twice by the Russian unit, interrogated in a basement for several hours and put through a mock execution when the soldiers fired a gun behind him. Still shaken, he said, “I just want to try to forget it all.”
Created to ‘Scare the Population’
Based in Russia’s far east, near the border with China, the 64th Brigade belongs to the Eastern Military District, long seen as the part of the Russian Army with the lowest levels of training and equipment.
The brigade has ethnic Russian commanders but consists largely of soldiers drawn from minority ethnic groups and disadvantaged communities, according to Col. Mykola Krasny, the head of public affairs of Ukrainian military intelligence.
In radio conversations that were intercepted by Ukrainian forces, some of the Russians expressed surprise that village roads in outlying areas of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, were paved with asphalt, he said.
“We see it as a deliberate policy to draft soldiers from depressed regions of Russia,” Colonel Krasny said.
Not a lot is known about the brigade, but Colonel Krasny claimed that it was notable for its lack of morality, for beatings of soldiers and for thieving. Drawn from a regiment that had served in Chechnya, the brigade was established on Jan. 1, 2009, shortly after Russia’s war in Georgia, Colonel Krasny said. The goal was clear, he added: to build up a fearsome army unit that could instill control.
A neighbor draped a blanket over a dead woman in April after the police had examined the body. She was found with a gunshot wound to the head, naked but for a fur coat, in a cellar outside a house in Bucha.An abandoned Russian post on a street in Bucha on April 3.
“The consequences of these politics was what happened in Bucha,” he said. “Having no discipline, and these aggressive habits, it looks like it was created to scare the population.”
He claimed that the Russian soldiers’ disadvantaged backgrounds, and the fact that they could act with impunity, prompted them “to do unspeakable things.”
It was not only the enemy who suffered their brutality. The Russian Army has long had a reputation for hazing its own soldiers, and on a cellphone left behind in Bucha by a member of the 64th, investigators found recent evidence of the practice: a video in which an officer is talking to a subordinate and then suddenly punches him in the side of the head while other soldiers stand around talking.
The Russian government did not respond to a request for comment on the accusations against the 64th Brigade but has repeatedly claimed that allegations of its forces having committed atrocities in Bucha and elsewhere are false.
Western analysts who have studied the Russian Army said that the behavior of troops in Bucha was not a surprise.
A classroom in Bucha ransacked by Russian soldiers. The school was used as a base by the occupying troops.A house in Bucha after being occupied by Russian troops. Ukrainian investigators have already identified 10 soldiers from the 64th Brigade and accused them of war crimes.
“It is consistent with the way they consider responding,” said Nick Reynolds, a researcher of land warfare at the Royal United Services Institute, a military research organization in London. “Reprisals are part and parcel of how the Russian military does business.”
The ‘Bad Guys’ Will Come
Killings occurred in Bucha from the first days that Russian troops appeared. The first units were airborne assault troops, paratroopers and special forces who fired on cars and civilians in the streets and detained men suspected of being in the Ukrainian Army or territorial defense.
The extent of the killings, and the seeming lack of hesitation among Russian soldiers to carry them out, has led Ukrainian officials to surmise that they were acting under orders.
“They couldn’t not know,” Bucha’s prosecutor, Mr. Kravchenko, said of senior military commanders. “I think the terror was planned.”
Many of the documented killings occurred on Yablunska Street, where bodies lay for weeks, visible on satellite images. But not far away, on a corner of Ivana Franka Street, a particular form of hell played out after March 12.
Volodymyr, 65, was detained and questioned in 144 Yablunska Street. He said that on March 4 he saw eight people with hands bound being led around a corner and that he then heard the gunshots as they were executed.
Residents had already been warned that things would get worse. A pensioner, Mykola, 67, said that the Russian troops who first came to the neighborhood had advised him to leave while he could. “‘After us, such bad guys will come,’” the commander told him, he recalled. “I think they had radio contact and they knew who was coming, and they had their own opinion of them.”
Mykola left Bucha before the 64th Brigade arrived.
The spring flowers are pushing up everywhere in Bucha, fruit trees are in blossom, and city workers have swept the streets and filled in some of the bomb craters. But at the end of Ivana Franka Street, amid smashed cars and destroyed homes, there is an eerie desolation.
“From this house to the end, no one is left alive,” said Ms. Havryliuk, 65. “Eleven people were killed here. Only we stayed alive.”
Her son and son-in-law had stayed behind to look after the house and the dogs, and were killed on March 12 or 13, when the 64th Brigade first arrived, she said. The death certificates said that they had been shot in the head.
Olha Havryliuk, left, stands in front of her home with her daughter, Iryna. Olha’s son, Roman Havryliuk, and Iryna’s husband, Serhiy Duhliy, were both found shot dead, along with a stranger, in the yard.The garden of the Havryliuks’ neighbors. Russian troops would use the space to cook on a barbecue, killing and plucking chickens and roasting them while dead bodies lay just yards away across the alley.
What happened over the next two weeks is hard to fathom. The few residents who stayed were confined to their homes and only occasionally dared to go out to fetch water from a well. Some of them saw people being detained by the Russians.
Nadezhda Cherednychenko, 50, pleaded with the soldiers to let her son go. He was being held in the yard of a house and his arm had been injured when she last saw him. She found him dead in the cellar of the same house three weeks later, after the Russians withdrew.
“They should be punished,” she said of his captors. “They brought so much pain to people. Mothers without children, fathers, children without parents. It’s something you cannot forgive.”
Neighbors who lived next door to the Havryliuks just disappeared. Volodymyr and Tetiana Shypilo, a teacher, and their son Andriy, 39, lived in one part of the house, and Oleh Yarmolenko, 47, lived alone in the other side. “They were all our relatives,” Ms. Havryliuk said.
Nadezhda Cherednychenko, 50, with a photograph of Volodymyr, her 27-year-old son.The cellar where Volodymyr Cherednychenko, who was detained for three weeks by Russian troops, was found shot through the ear.
Down a side alley lived Lidiya Sydorenko, 62, and her husband Serhiy, 65. Their daughter, Tetiana Naumova, said that she spoke to them by telephone midmorning on March 22.
“Mother was crying the whole time,” Ms. Naumova said. “She was usually an optimist, but I think she had a bad feeling.”
Minutes later, Russian soldiers came in and demanded to search their garage. They told a neighbor to leave, shooting at the ground by her feet.
“By lunchtime they had killed them,” Ms. Naumova said.
She returned to the house with her husband, Vitaliy, and her son Anton last month after the Russian troops withdrew from Kyiv. Her parents were nowhere to be found, but they found ominous traces — her father’s hat with bullet holes in it, three pools of blood and a piece of her mother’s scalp and hair.
There was also no sign of the Shypilos or of Mr. Yarmolenko, except trails of blood where bodies had been dragged along the floor of their house.
Eventually, French forensic investigators solved the mystery.
They examined six charred bodies found in an empty lot up the street and confirmed that they were the missing civilians: the Sydorenkos, the three Shypilos and Mr. Yarmolenko. Several bore bullet wounds but three of them had had limbs severed, including Ms. Naumova’s mother, the investigators told the families.
Her father had multiple gunshot wounds to the head and chest, her mother had had an arm and a leg cut off, she said.
“They tortured them,” Ms. Havryliuk said, “and burned them to cover their tracks.”
Oleksandr Chubko contributed reporting from Bucha, Ukraine.
Tetiana Naumova and her husband, Vitaliy, with photographs of her parents, Lidiya and Serhiy Sydorenko.
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