by Robert D. Mcfadden, The New York Times
It was like one of those terrifying crimes of 10 or 15 years ago, when the sound of gunshots was common and New Yorkers were wary of their own streets. A young couple came out of a nightclub in Greenwich Village at 2:30 a.m. yesterday and were walking to their car on a dark, deserted street when two robbers confronted them.
It happened fast. There were only fleeting impressions: they were black men in their early 20’s with thin, clean-shaven faces; one had shoulder-length dreadlocks, the other short braids; both wore dark baggy clothing, and one had on a maroon long-sleeved T-shirt.
One drew a small black handgun, the police said, and they demanded money. But for some reason - perhaps pride or a protective instinct - Kirill Nekrasov, 25, did not comply. Instead, he reached for the gun.
There was a struggle and two shots went off. Mr. Nekrasov, struck in the head and critically wounded, crumpled onto a sidewalk grate in front of the five-story tan brick apartment building at 176 West Houston Street, near Bedford Street. As the assailants ran off, Mr. Nekrasov’s companion, Natalya Shimunova, 27, began screaming.
The sound of the shots awoke Richard Benedetti, 57, who retired as a police officer 16 years ago and lives just across West Houston in the Breen Towers. He looked out his second-story bedroom window as the drama unfolded.
“I heard boom, boom!” he said. “It just hit me like that. My instincts kicked in. I knew they were gunshots. Then all of a sudden, I heard a woman start screaming. She was grabbing her cellphone, trying to get help. She was real panicky.”
In the shadows - the nearest streetlamp was 25 yards away - he saw a man lying on the sidewalk, and beside him the woman stood shrieking into her phone in heavily accented English. He said, “She’s shouting, Houston Street, Houston Street,” pronouncing it like the Texas city, not HOUSE-ton, the way New Yorkers say it.
“She was screaming, `He’s still breathing! He’s still live! Please come! We need help!” Mr. Benedetti said he reached for his own telephone to call 911, but before he could get through he heard the sirens approaching.
Across the Avenue of the Americas, at a firehouse that is home to Engine 24 and Ladder 5, Firefighter Marcel Claes was on duty and heard banging on the front door. He pulled it open.
“A civilian was standing there and said, `Someone was shot.’
“I said, `How do you know he was shot?’
“He said, `I heard it.’ ”
Firefighter Claes strode across the intersection, where two police cars had already pulled up. More emergency vehicles were wailing closer. “Before I had time, they were already there - the paramedics, the cops, everybody,” Firefighter Claes said. He saw the victim lying on his side, the paramedics kneeling beside him. “I could only see half his face,” the firefighter said. He remembered that the man appeared to be wearing a running suit.
The paramedics hooked up an intravenous drip, lifted Mr. Nekrasov onto a stretcher and slid it into the back of an ambulance, which sped away to St. Vincent’s Manhattan Hospital a few blocks north. Mr. Nekrasov was listed in critical condition last night.
The detectives took Ms. Shimunova with them to ask her what she remembered of what had happened, as police cars zigzagged through the neighborhood, searching for the vanished assailants.
Aside from Ms. Shimunova, who was not injured, there appeared to be no eyewitnesses. The windows of the apartment building were dark. The real estate office on the ground floor and Z’s Basement clothing store, down 12 steps beyond the fire-engine red railing, were both shut, as was the laundry and a cleaners up the block. Only the Quick Stop Gourmet Deli down West Houston was open, but the line-of-sight was bad, and nobody there saw anything, investigators said.
At the high-rise apartment building where Mr. Nekrasov lives, at 303 Beverly Road in the Kensington section of Brooklyn, friends and neighbors said that he was a Russian immigrant who had been brought by his mother, Klara, from what was then Leningrad about 23 years ago, when he was 2.
They said he was a structural engineer who had earned his degree at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn and worked in Manhattan. They said that he still lived with his mother, and they described Ms. Shimunova as a college friend of Mr. Nekrasov’s, not his girlfriend.
“He spends a lot of time with his mother,” a cousin, Misha Gutkin, said at the hospital, where Mr. Nekrasov’s mother and other relatives and friends gathered in a room to await word from the doctors. Mr. Gutkin said they had been told only that Mr. Nekrasov had been given a blood transfusion and had undergone surgery.
Luba Isayez, a neighbor, called him “a very nice boy, a very smart boy,” who was “very good to his mother.” She said that mother and son sometimes took walks together in nearby Prospect Park, and added: “He’s very quiet. I don’t even believe that he was out so late in Manhattan. He doesn’t go out very often. He’s always with his mother. He loves her very much.”
Ms. Isayez said the mother had brought her son to the United States in search of economic, political and religious freedoms. “Everyone was leaving,” she said. “They were looking for a better way of life.”
Other neighbors said that the Nekrasovs had lived in the building for 10 years and attended a synagogue at East Fifth Street and Church Avenue in Kensington.
After years of declining street crime in New York, the shooting seemed like a throwback to a more dangerous era, when killings and robberies, often a result of the crack cocaine trade, were common and residents thought twice about walking out of doors late at night.
In the light of day, the scene of the crime seemed less menacing. Traffic slid by on Houston and the Avenue of the Americas, and pedestrians were out in droves in the area, a nexus of Greenwich Village and SoHo, with busy restaurants and shops, art theaters like the Film Forum and clubs down the side streets.
Under a spindly, leafless tree, bloodstains still flecked the iron grate where Mr. Nekrasov fell, despite the efforts of Vincente Gamez, the superintendent in charge of maintaining the 22 apartments at 176 West Houston. He had hosed down the sidewalk before the Saturday crowds got up .
“It’s a shame,” said Mr. Benedetti, the retired police officer. “I hate to say it, but that’s the way life is sometimes. Not just in New York but everywhere.”