By LIZ ROBBINS
He was caught up in drugs, some people said, as both a dealer and a user. Other people knew him for the graffiti he scrawled alongside a desolate freight line that runs between Brooklyn and Queens. They saw him as a short-tempered bully, who had come to the United States as a child from Ukraine and never found his way.
No one in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, it seemed, quite understood the young man, Maksim Gelman, but most everyone who knew him agreed on one disturbing thing: He had a deep, unquenchable obsession for a young neighborhood woman who had rebuffed him, Yelena Bulchenko. Mr. Gelman killed Ms. Bulchenko on Friday, the police said, along with three others, in a frantic 28-hour span.
Mr. Gelman, 23, who had immigrated in 1994, was being held in Brooklyn. He is accused of four murders, two assaults and two robberies.
He will be charged in Manhattan later in the week, a law enforcement official said, in the assault on a subway passenger, Joseph Lozito, the final victim before three police officers subdued and arrested Mr. Gelman on a No. 3 train near Times Square on Saturday.
One clue to the crime rampage seemed to be sprayed on the cement walls alongside a sunken track bed of the freight line under the overpass of Ocean Avenue.
Near the top of a wall, in bright cherry red letters, the name “Yelena” had been spray-painted. Farther along the wall, the name was spray-painted again, near a pink heart.
On the opposite side of the tracks, there was the word “Max,” which the police said they believed was Mr. Gelman’s tag.
On Sunday, neighbors of Ms. Bulchenko, a dental assistant, mourned her loss and spoke angrily of Mr. Gelman. “There were definitely warning signs,” one neighbor, Gabriell Kiernan, 32, said. “We told her not to have anything to do with him. She was scared of him.”
Friends of Ms. Bulchenko said that after briefly becoming friendly with Mr. Gelman last summer, she had been afraid of him. The two never dated, the friends said, and as Ms. Bulchenko became more alarmed over his behavior, she refused to answer his telephone calls or answer the door when he appeared without warning outside her home.
One time in late summer, according to Ms. Kiernan, Mr. Gelman pounded on the door, yelling that he would kill her if she did not open it for him. She did not.
According to a police official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was continuing, there were no records of Ms. Bulchenko’s having filed a complaint to the police.
“He was nobody,” Gerard Honig, 24, said of Mr. Gelman. He added that he had been Ms. Bulchenko’s boyfriend over the last two and a half months.
Mr. Honig said Mr. Gelman had called her repeatedly though she had had no desire to talk to him.
Ryan Rosario, 20, said he had also dated Ms. Bulchenko and had introduced her to Mr. Gelman. They had briefly been friendly, with Ms. Bulchenko even going to the pool at the apartment complex where he lived with his mother and her companion.
But when Mr. Gelman started being verbally abusive and calling her repeatedly, she started pulling away from him, the friends added.
How Mr. Gelman’s life came apart, and how he brought those closest down with him, was the subject of the continued police investigation on Sunday.
Mr. Gelman and his mother, Svetlana, had come to New York two years after Mr. Gelman’s father immigrated from Ukraine through refugee status, the police said.
The father later gained citizenship but returned to Ukraine. His son and wife became citizens around 2005, the police said.
Mr. Gelman had attended Lincoln High School, according to a former student there, but it was unclear if he had graduated; he was known around school as being a skateboarder.
Mr. Gelman had been arrested 10 times since 2003, several times for graffiti-writing, but most recently, in January, for possession of crack cocaine.
“When I was little he kind of did bully me,” said Filip Bendersky, 14, a neighbor. “He used to take my water guns and put in hot sauce and soap.”
But Mr. Gelman’s pranks and taunting later turned into spite, and worse. He was behaving so belligerently and menacingly one night last fall at the Blue Velvet Lounge, on Avenue U, that the lounge’s owner said she had to make him leave.
“You learn to tell the difference between when a person is just talking, and when somebody has aggressive intent,” said Yana Levin, 37, the owner.
“He was saying, ‘Oh, you might regret it. You’ll throw me out now, but you might live to regret it.’ ”
Mr. Gelman may have fulfilled another threat in the killings that, according to the police, he started just past 5 a.m. Friday at his mother’s apartment on East 27th Street, near Emmons Avenue.
After arguing with his mother’s companion, Aleksandr Kuznetsov, over whether he could borrow Mr. Kuznetsov’s 2004 Lexus, Mr. Gelman stabbed him at least 11 times with a kitchen knife, the police said.
He left his mother uninjured and raced off with the car to Ms. Bulchenko’s home.
She was not there, and, the police said, he fatally stabbed her mother, Anna Bulchenko, and six hours later ambushed Ms. Bulchenko in her home, killing her as he had once threatened to do.
Then, the police said, he sped off, rammed a green Pontiac Bonneville and stabbed the driver, Arthur DiCrescento, 60, before stealing his car.
Headed north on Ocean Avenue, the Bonneville struck a pedestrian, Stephen Tannenbaum, and killed him, the police said.
The police said they found four kitchen knives in Mr. Kuznetsov’s Lexus. Other knives were in the kitchen sink at his mother’s house. Mr. Gelman was found with two knives on him, a large kitchen knife he used to stab the subway passenger, and one smaller pocketknife, the police said.
When he was arrested, Mr. Gelman was wearing a black and yellow warm-up jacket that belonged to Sheldon Pottinger, 25, the owner of a 2001 Nissan; according to the police, Mr. Gelman slashed him on the hands and then stole his car on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn.
Mr. Pottinger said in an interview that he recognized the jacket immediately on television.
On Sunday in the 61st Precinct station house where he was held overnight, Mr. Gelman refused to be fingerprinted, authorities said, but one law enforcement official said he did not have to be restrained.
As he was being taken from the station house about 3:30 p.m. on Saturday, Mr. Gelman cursed and yelled that it “was a setup” as he was led to a vehicle.
In the hours before he appeared in court, he told officers that he was “a sacrificial lamb,” according to one law enforcement official.
In his appearance, Mr. Gelman said nothing to the court. The public defender representing him on Sunday, Michael Baum, said Mr. Gelman understood the charges against him. No plea was entered and no bail was set, and another hearing was scheduled for Monday.
Jack Begg, Joseph Goldstein, Colin Moynihan and Ethan Wilensky-Lanford contributed reporting.
He was caught up in drugs, some people said, as both a dealer and a user. Other people knew him for the graffiti he scrawled alongside a desolate freight line that runs between Brooklyn and Queens. They saw him as a short-tempered bully, who had come to the United States as a child from Ukraine and never found his way.
No one in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, it seemed, quite understood the young man, Maksim Gelman, but most everyone who knew him agreed on one disturbing thing: He had a deep, unquenchable obsession for a young neighborhood woman who had rebuffed him, Yelena Bulchenko. Mr. Gelman killed Ms. Bulchenko on Friday, the police said, along with three others, in a frantic 28-hour span.
Mr. Gelman, 23, who had immigrated in 1994, was being held in Brooklyn. He is accused of four murders, two assaults and two robberies.
He will be charged in Manhattan later in the week, a law enforcement official said, in the assault on a subway passenger, Joseph Lozito, the final victim before three police officers subdued and arrested Mr. Gelman on a No. 3 train near Times Square on Saturday.
One clue to the crime rampage seemed to be sprayed on the cement walls alongside a sunken track bed of the freight line under the overpass of Ocean Avenue.
Near the top of a wall, in bright cherry red letters, the name “Yelena” had been spray-painted. Farther along the wall, the name was spray-painted again, near a pink heart.
On the opposite side of the tracks, there was the word “Max,” which the police said they believed was Mr. Gelman’s tag.
On Sunday, neighbors of Ms. Bulchenko, a dental assistant, mourned her loss and spoke angrily of Mr. Gelman. “There were definitely warning signs,” one neighbor, Gabriell Kiernan, 32, said. “We told her not to have anything to do with him. She was scared of him.”
Friends of Ms. Bulchenko said that after briefly becoming friendly with Mr. Gelman last summer, she had been afraid of him. The two never dated, the friends said, and as Ms. Bulchenko became more alarmed over his behavior, she refused to answer his telephone calls or answer the door when he appeared without warning outside her home.
One time in late summer, according to Ms. Kiernan, Mr. Gelman pounded on the door, yelling that he would kill her if she did not open it for him. She did not.
According to a police official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was continuing, there were no records of Ms. Bulchenko’s having filed a complaint to the police.
“He was nobody,” Gerard Honig, 24, said of Mr. Gelman. He added that he had been Ms. Bulchenko’s boyfriend over the last two and a half months.
Mr. Honig said Mr. Gelman had called her repeatedly though she had had no desire to talk to him.
Ryan Rosario, 20, said he had also dated Ms. Bulchenko and had introduced her to Mr. Gelman. They had briefly been friendly, with Ms. Bulchenko even going to the pool at the apartment complex where he lived with his mother and her companion.
But when Mr. Gelman started being verbally abusive and calling her repeatedly, she started pulling away from him, the friends added.
How Mr. Gelman’s life came apart, and how he brought those closest down with him, was the subject of the continued police investigation on Sunday.
Mr. Gelman and his mother, Svetlana, had come to New York two years after Mr. Gelman’s father immigrated from Ukraine through refugee status, the police said.
The father later gained citizenship but returned to Ukraine. His son and wife became citizens around 2005, the police said.
Mr. Gelman had attended Lincoln High School, according to a former student there, but it was unclear if he had graduated; he was known around school as being a skateboarder.
Mr. Gelman had been arrested 10 times since 2003, several times for graffiti-writing, but most recently, in January, for possession of crack cocaine.
“When I was little he kind of did bully me,” said Filip Bendersky, 14, a neighbor. “He used to take my water guns and put in hot sauce and soap.”
But Mr. Gelman’s pranks and taunting later turned into spite, and worse. He was behaving so belligerently and menacingly one night last fall at the Blue Velvet Lounge, on Avenue U, that the lounge’s owner said she had to make him leave.
“You learn to tell the difference between when a person is just talking, and when somebody has aggressive intent,” said Yana Levin, 37, the owner.
“He was saying, ‘Oh, you might regret it. You’ll throw me out now, but you might live to regret it.’ ”
Mr. Gelman may have fulfilled another threat in the killings that, according to the police, he started just past 5 a.m. Friday at his mother’s apartment on East 27th Street, near Emmons Avenue.
After arguing with his mother’s companion, Aleksandr Kuznetsov, over whether he could borrow Mr. Kuznetsov’s 2004 Lexus, Mr. Gelman stabbed him at least 11 times with a kitchen knife, the police said.
He left his mother uninjured and raced off with the car to Ms. Bulchenko’s home.
She was not there, and, the police said, he fatally stabbed her mother, Anna Bulchenko, and six hours later ambushed Ms. Bulchenko in her home, killing her as he had once threatened to do.
Then, the police said, he sped off, rammed a green Pontiac Bonneville and stabbed the driver, Arthur DiCrescento, 60, before stealing his car.
Headed north on Ocean Avenue, the Bonneville struck a pedestrian, Stephen Tannenbaum, and killed him, the police said.
The police said they found four kitchen knives in Mr. Kuznetsov’s Lexus. Other knives were in the kitchen sink at his mother’s house. Mr. Gelman was found with two knives on him, a large kitchen knife he used to stab the subway passenger, and one smaller pocketknife, the police said.
When he was arrested, Mr. Gelman was wearing a black and yellow warm-up jacket that belonged to Sheldon Pottinger, 25, the owner of a 2001 Nissan; according to the police, Mr. Gelman slashed him on the hands and then stole his car on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn.
Mr. Pottinger said in an interview that he recognized the jacket immediately on television.
On Sunday in the 61st Precinct station house where he was held overnight, Mr. Gelman refused to be fingerprinted, authorities said, but one law enforcement official said he did not have to be restrained.
As he was being taken from the station house about 3:30 p.m. on Saturday, Mr. Gelman cursed and yelled that it “was a setup” as he was led to a vehicle.
In the hours before he appeared in court, he told officers that he was “a sacrificial lamb,” according to one law enforcement official.
In his appearance, Mr. Gelman said nothing to the court. The public defender representing him on Sunday, Michael Baum, said Mr. Gelman understood the charges against him. No plea was entered and no bail was set, and another hearing was scheduled for Monday.
Jack Begg, Joseph Goldstein, Colin Moynihan and Ethan Wilensky-Lanford contributed reporting.
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