Nikolay Alekseyevich Soltys (May 19, 1974 – February 13, 2002) was a Ukrainian fugitive charged by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California in a Federal Bureau of Investigation arrest warrant. The federal charges were for Unlawful Flight to Avoid Prosecution and there were California arrest warrants for six murders of his family members in and around the Sacramento area in August 2001.
Background
Residents from Soltys' former hometown of Shumsk in Western Ukraine described him as a shoemaker with violent and unpredictable behavior.
At the time, Shumsk was a small religious town with a population of 5,000 residents. The town had four churches: two Orthodox churches from different branches, one Roman Catholic and one Pentecostal. Soltys and his parents belonged to the Pentecostal congregation. His parents joined a wave of Ukrainian religious population seeking refuge to the United States. Having successfully been granted refugee status in the U.S. by the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), his parents migrated to New York. Soltys was known to have had violent episodes towards his parents.
ABC News reported that a newspaper from his homeland, the Kyiv daily Fakty (Facts), noted Soltys as being "abrupt" and sometimes violent prior to moving to the United States. He had arrived in the U.S. to be with his physically ailing father.
The Fakty had apparently confirmed the 27-year-old refugee had a history of violence during an interview of Soltys' parents-in-law. They also denied that his rejection for enrollment into the Ukrainian military service was due to his mental instability. Instead, the relatives told the Fakty "What kept him out of the army was due to his flat feet."
Igor Nakonechnyi, the father of Soltys' wife Lyuba, told Fakty that three years prior to the murders Soltys had attacked Lyuba with an ax that Soltys had stored in a closet "for self-defense". Lyuba telephoned her parents seeking help, frantically asking them to come help her "so he doesn't kill me", Nakonechnyi told Fakty. "We begged our daughter not to marry him," Nakonechnyi said. "She always listened and was respectful, but then for the first time in her life she went against her parents, firmly saying, 'We love one another and I am going to live with him.'"
The brother of Soltys' murdered wife, Petro Nakonechnyi, said that even though he saw Soltys as a friend, he did not want the couple to get married because he saw Soltys as having "an unbalanced temper". After the couple married, Soltys often threatened to hang himself, Nakonechnyi said. He also said, "He beat her when she was pregnant, and once pushed her out of a car on low speed."
During one violent encounter, Nakonechnyi claimed that he and his brother went to the married couple's residence and tried to take their sister back home. Soltys retaliated and tried to attack the brothers with an ax. After this incident, Soltys left Ukraine, leaving his wife and newborn son and joining his parents in New York in 1998. After he arrived in New York, he ended up jobless after a car accident injury and was collecting welfare assistance.
Polina Horbonis, Soltys' Ukrainian language teacher at a local school in Shumsk, before he attended vocational training to become a shoemaker, said: "This child had such a character that you never knew what to expect from him in the next moment."
Migration
Shortly after his son was born, Nikolay left Ukraine and traveled to Binghamton, New York, where his parents had settled in the mid-1990s. Family members say Nikolay's parents had moved to the United States under the 1989 Lautenberg Amendment to the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act, a policy that allowed refugees from post-Soviet states to migrate to the U.S., which included Ukraine.
During this time, over 90 percent of the recent Ukrainian refugees in the United States had successfully immigrated as an outcome of the Lautenberg Amendment. The amendment required the U.S. attorney general to identify Evangelical Christians, Ukrainian Catholics, Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox and Jews. These identified populations of refugees were referred to as "likely targets of persecution" in the former Soviet Union. Under this legislation, candidates were permitted admission if they could prove a justifiable fear of persecution. In practice, one's admission could be granted by simply telling U.S. embassy officials that such a fear was in place.