‘I am not ready to let her go’: Boyfriend of Crimea massacre victim breaks spine in suicide attempt
Hours after his girlfriend, injured by the Kerch shooter’s nail bomb, died en-route to a Moscow hospital, Armen Badalyan jumped out of an apartment block window. He did not die but is likely to suffer life-changing injuries.
Classmates said that 17-year-old student and aspiring model Viktoria Demchuk was one of the most popular girls in the entire Kerch polytechnic college. When her fellow student Vladislav Roslyakov set off an improvised bomb in the canteen on Wednesday morning, she was near the epicenter of the blast.
Viktoria was delivered to the local hospital, where Badalyan, a 19 year-old former football trainee, stayed by her side.
She had suffered devastating injuries and doctors decided to amputate her leg.
“When he discovered that she lost her leg, he said ‘It doesn’t matter, we will find the money and buy her a quality prosthesis,’” a mutual friend told Komsomolskaya Pravda.
But the nightmare wasn’t over.
On Thursday, doctors decided that facilities in Kerch, a Crimean town of 140,000, were insufficient.
She was loaded in a helicopter that would take her to the regional capital Simferopol, before a medical plane would fly Viktoria to Moscow. She died before the first part of the journey was over.
“Frankly speaking, my whole life has been s***. Vika is a present for an idiot like me,” Armen wrote on his social media account on VK. “I love her a lot. She is the best thing that ever happened to me. And I am not ready to let her go. This is the truth, and I am not hiding it, and I don’t care what anyone else says or thinks.”
Armen’s sister said her sibling was “in a state of shock” but no one anticipated what he would do next.
In the early hours of Friday, Badalyan changed his status on his VK page – “I love you, together forever” – and leaped out of a fourth-floor window.
But there would be no tragically simple end to the doomed love story.
Armen did not lose his life and instead suffered devastating spinal injuries. At the same hospital where his girlfriend was being treated, he is now receiving emergency care, as doctors also weigh up whether he is well enough to undertake an airborne journey to a specialist facility.
Meanwhile on his social media page, hundreds have left goodwill messages that he is unable to read, all amid arguments about whether Armen did the right thing.
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