Author Topic: Man is Stabbed, Cries for Help, People Hear, Do Nothing, Man Dies  (Read 919 times)

Elano

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No one called police for over an hour as the victim cried for help near Poinsettia Park. Residents say the area has been growing more dangerous, and they are organizing to fight crime.

She'd tell him, time and again: Don't walk at night. The place has changed. It's not safe. They'd been married, though, for 44 years. After a certain point, it wasn't really a conversation; it was like a song they'd played a thousand times, enjoyed more for routine than anything else.

"Ne perezhivaitye," he'd tell her. "Don't worry."

He left their little apartment in West Hollywood at 9 p.m. March 9, a Sunday, walking out past a bookshelf full of all the dictionaries required of a Kazakhstani in L.A.: one in English, one in Russian, a Russian-to-English, a Spanish-to-English.

Katan Khaimov was a 70-year-old diabetic, but he was in great shape. He often walked for an hour or more, so his family didn't worry at first. But when 11 p.m. passed, his wife, Tamara, went looking for him.

On the west side of Poinsettia Park, below Santa Monica Boulevard, she pulled her car next to an intersection that had been cordoned off with yellow crime-scene tape.

"What happened here?" she asked a police officer.

"Who are you?" he said.

"I'm looking for my husband."

The fact that Khaimov was slain has been hard enough for his neighborhood to accept. But the awful coda of his life has added to the soul-searching. Neighbors, it turns out, heard him dying -- crying for help after being stabbed in the stomach -- for more than an hour before anyone called the police.

Officials say several residents in Khaimov's neighborhood, which straddles the cities of West Hollywood and Los Angeles, believed his moans were the sounds of a vagrant. Cars also passed by while he was lying next to the street, still alive, his head and one arm flopped over the curb.

"Nobody cared," said his 26-year-old daughter, Olga, the youngest of his four children. "To think that people didn't answer a man's cries for help. . . . Even if it is a bum. So what? Call the cops. It's a person, a human being."


There have been no arrests. Khaimov was not robbed, and police have declined to speculate about what might have motivated his attacker. It's unclear how many people saw or heard Khaimov that night, and it's unclear whether he could have been saved had he been taken to a hospital earlier.

Regardless, there is a sense here that Khaimov was failed, somehow.

"It is a shocking thing that nobody went out to help," said 47-year-old Paul Lerner, a public safety advocate and a healthcare marketing consultant who has lived in the area for five years.

The neighborhood has long fancied itself something of an urban tribe, where Russian-speaking Jews like Khaimov shared the narrow, leafy streets and the boxy apartment buildings with fixed-income seniors, club-hopping hipsters and young gays.

It was never going to be mistaken for Mayberry, but it was -- or was supposed to be -- a place where people took care of one another. A place where, on your nightly constitutional, you might encounter misfits and oddballs, but not murderers.

Katan Khaimov and his family lived in a house he built with his father in a factory village in Kazakhstan, north of the Uzbekistan capital of Tashkent. He was the head of an engineering company and helped oversee the construction of gymnasiums and hospitals, but it was not enough.

"The way it worked was that you did not get paid well unless you stole. And he was an honest man," Olga Khaimova said. When the United States offered his family immigration visas in 1995, he jumped at the chance.

"He moved here for us," Olga Khaimova said.

He pushed the value of hard work and education on his four children. It worked -- two grown daughters, who now live in Israel, are a music teacher and a doctor; Olga's brother is a pharmacist; and Olga is studying to become a nurse practitioner.

Khaimov, meanwhile, found that his educational degrees did not translate in the United States. His days of being a construction engineer were behind him, so he became a renaissance man instead.

He sang baritone in a community choir. He kayaked the Colorado River. He grew tomatoes and cucumbers in a community garden. He was nice to everyone, even Olga's 4-pound iguana, T-Rex, whom he allowed to crawl under his sweater on cold days.

It was a simple life. It was what he wanted. He was not rich. He had no cellphone. He had no driver's license, which is one reason he walked, sometimes three times a day -- to the market, to the local parks, to Runyon Canyon, a popular hiking area.

"He was just a wonderful man," his wife said the other day, her eyes facing the floor, her voice nearly a whisper. "He liked to live."

Within the last year or so, his neighborhood began to change. Indeed, some argue that no one should be blamed for failing to come to Khaimov's aid because the neighborhood has been inundated with a gritty cast of lost souls -- mentally ill and homeless people, junkies and prostitutes.
 

S P I C E

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Re: Man is Stabbed, Cries for Help, People Hear, Do Nothing, Man Dies
« Reply #1 on: May 10, 2008, 02:51:05 AM »
This world we live in is such a sick place.


DIP DIP SET SET
 

D-Stress

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Re: Man is Stabbed, Cries for Help, People Hear, Do Nothing, Man Dies
« Reply #2 on: May 10, 2008, 06:07:53 AM »
fuck people. >:(
 

QuietTruth

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Re: Man is Stabbed, Cries for Help, People Hear, Do Nothing, Man Dies
« Reply #3 on: May 10, 2008, 06:29:36 AM »
"To think that people didn't answer a man's cries for help. . . . Even if it is a bum. So what? Call the cops. It's a person, a human being."
On the fuckin' real!!


What the fuck is wrong wit people??
 

Elano

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Re: Man is Stabbed, Cries for Help, People Hear, Do Nothing, Man Dies
« Reply #4 on: May 10, 2008, 06:34:19 AM »
"To think that people didn't answer a man's cries for help. . . . Even if it is a bum. So what? Call the cops. It's a person, a human being."
On the fuckin' real!!


What the fuck is wrong wit people??

this "story" makes me feel real sick
 

Cheese

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Re: Man is Stabbed, Cries for Help, People Hear, Do Nothing, Man Dies
« Reply #5 on: May 10, 2008, 07:56:48 AM »
It's group behaviour, this is a well known phenomenon. Most of y'all prolly wouldn't have called for any help either.
 

D-Stress

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Re: Man is Stabbed, Cries for Help, People Hear, Do Nothing, Man Dies
« Reply #6 on: May 10, 2008, 07:58:39 AM »
thats why i said "fuck people".
 

KeG

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Re: Man is Stabbed, Cries for Help, People Hear, Do Nothing, Man Dies
« Reply #7 on: May 10, 2008, 07:06:45 PM »
It's group behaviour, this is a well known phenomenon. Most of y'all prolly wouldn't have called for any help either.

Yep. Each person thinks that someone else must've already called the police and in the end the police aren't notified until well after the crime has happened.
 

J Bananas

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Re: Man is Stabbed, Cries for Help, People Hear, Do Nothing, Man Dies
« Reply #8 on: May 10, 2008, 09:18:53 PM »
Sad but....
I hear bums screaming outside of my apartment all night every night. Usually because of alcohol or heroin withdrawal. It is a damn shame what happened, and it makes me sick of humans, but like dude above said, we'd all be guilty if it were any of us in that neighborhood.
 

D-Reborn

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Machiavelli

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Re: Man is Stabbed, Cries for Help, People Hear, Do Nothing, Man Dies
« Reply #10 on: May 11, 2008, 11:04:15 AM »
It's group behaviour, this is a well known phenomenon. Most of y'all prolly wouldn't have called for any help either.

yeah its been done in a psychology study
 

herpes

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Re: Man is Stabbed, Cries for Help, People Hear, Do Nothing, Man Dies
« Reply #11 on: May 11, 2008, 11:27:04 AM »
LMAO @ people saying people suck for not doing anything are probably the same ones that say fucking bums why dont we just kill them already.  And for the record I probably just would of walked away as well.
 

Ozir

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7even

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Re: Man is Stabbed, Cries for Help, People Hear, Do Nothing, Man Dies
« Reply #13 on: May 12, 2008, 04:18:48 AM »
Lol@finding this remotely excuseable. A bum shouting around because of lack of beer is not exactly comparable to a man being stabbed and dying. I've been calling for help when I saw people needing it... and I have seen other people calling for help too... very normal behaviour, nothing noble at all.
Cause I don't care where I belong no more
What we share or not I will ignore
And I won't waste my time fitting in
Cause I don't think contrast is a sin
No, it's not a sin
 

Elano

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Re: Man is Stabbed, Cries for Help, People Hear, Do Nothing, Man Dies
« Reply #14 on: May 12, 2008, 04:50:34 AM »
A bum shouting around because of lack of beer is not exactly comparable to a man being stabbed and dying.