In Latvia Yesterday, 20:5013 Video Broadcast: The ex-spouse of Rusiņa, who was killed, desperately asked for help, receiving only formal instructions in return

On the other hand, General Prosecutor Juris Stukāns in an interview “de facto” states that the society’s tolerance for violence and the lack of a preventive defense system for women are to blame for what happened, and also admits that Rusiņš became even more violent after his short stay in prison.

“In this case, why it happened like that, I could put forward another thesis. Because he [Rusiņš] sat for twenty or so days and the person’s attitude towards the whole world changed completely. And he became even more violent already with his actions, because until the prison he still, as I understood, tyrannized this woman from a distance,” in a conversation with “de facto”, which is his first interview about the murder of a woman in Jēkabpils district, Prosecutor General Stukāns admitted the following explanation for the crime committed by Rusiš.

Stukāns is wrong, because the murdered woman had experienced violent attacks by Rusinas both during their marriage and afterwards – more than a year before the murder. “de facto” says that Rusiņš had raised a knife against his spouse at least once before. In the parking lot of the “Selia” shopping center last February, he scratched a woman’s forehead with a knife, and the police qualified it as minor injuries. Rusiņš was fined 500 euros for that.

The persecuted woman herself had described this event both in the application written to Stukān last September and in the letter sent to the Ombudsman at the beginning of this year. Rusinš came to the car in the parking lot, opened the door and, threatening her with a knife, deliberately pressed it to her forehead and hand several times. After that time, the woman had a panicky fear of Rusina, because in her opinion, only the fact that other people happened to be nearby, including her relative, prevented Rusina from a greater and more dangerous manifestation of violence.

At the time when the police examined the event in the parking lot, the murdered woman’s lawyer Anna Nore did not represent her yet and learned about the incident already when the administrative punishment for Rusin had come into force. In the opinion of the lawyer, the police should have reacted more harshly even then: “It is generally such a nonsense case, because basically the police themselves wrote in their last decision of June 2, 2022 that there was an attack with a knife, but causing minor injuries. Well, an attack with a knife is extremely serious, it is life-threatening!”

At that time, Rusiņš stopped the attack and ran away, because a relative of her client returned from the store with her seven-year-old daughter and both started screaming, says the lawyer.

What the relative said also shows that Rusiņš was not joking. “She said that she had seen that knife, and that knife had a rather long handle. And she even managed to hear the phrase: “I’ll poke your eyes out!” Well, simply a fine in the amount of one minimum monthly salary for such an attack is nonsense,” says lawyer Nore.

The attack in the parking lot took place a day after the court granted the woman temporary protection against violence, prohibiting Rusin from approaching and communicating with the woman herself and her children and the obligation to stay at least 100 meters away from her place of residence. However, Rusiņš regularly violated this – this is evidenced both by the woman’s submissions and the criminal proceedings initiated against Rusiņš, as well as by the “de facto” available videos from March and August of last year, where he is seen physically harassing a woman or sitting at her house.

The actions of Rusiš described in the woman’s submissions – painting the windows, possibly cutting the electricity and internet wires, banging on the windows at night – are also confirmed by the neighbors. “He walked, he walked here. Painted the windows with black paint, then from that side during the night, I heard him there [klauvēja],” says the resident of the house.

In addition to physical harassment, Rusiņš also terrorized the woman with calls and text messages from various numbers. She later recorded the frightening and even clearly threatening messages with a bailiff. Later, she added the photos to the application to the police with a request to start criminal proceedings for threats to kill or cause serious bodily harm, because that is exactly how she perceived the messages sent by Rusiņa. The police did not initiate such a process.

The police, at least initially, also rejected the woman’s application with a request to open a criminal case against Rusina for hooliganism. The persecutor’s calls to the work phone and posts on the social networks of her workplace, the Center for Disease Prevention and Control, significantly disrupted the work of the center and even the Health Inspectorate located in the same building.

In addition, Olegs Belovs, chief inspector of the East Zemgale station of the State Police, concluded his response to the application written at the beginning of this year with an instruction to the harassed woman: “At the same time, we inform you that you are also obliged to take actions that would prevent new administrative and criminal violations, for which you have already been punished several times before informed. That is, to change the phone numbers of both yours and your children and other relatives, to avoid L. Rusiņš’s illegal actions, that is, not to answer text messages and his phone calls, not to answer unfamiliar numbers, if you suspect that the caller is L. Rusiņš, not to inform him about your daily activities, as well as changing your workplace, etc.”

Perhaps this police response was the last straw, which prompted the woman to write a letter to Juris Jansons the next day, on January 11. It began with the words: “Driven by extreme desperation, I am forced to turn to you for help.” In the ten-page long letter, the woman also mentioned the “advice” of the police.

“How will changing my or family members’ personal number prevent L. Rusiņa from calling both institutions on his work phone? How will the change of personal numbers prevent L. Rusiņas from creating fake profiles on the Facebook website? Changing the number will not solve the problem, because it will not stop L. Rusiņa from ever approaching my son and extorting my new phone number from him,” the woman wrote emotionally. “I don’t know from where [policistam] O. Belov has such confidence that I will tell L. Rusiņas about when and where I will go. If L.Rusiņš is well informed about my daily activities, he observes and tracks me. How it happens, I don’t know. Changing the workplace will not prevent L. Rusiņa from terrorizing my next employer? How many such jobs will I change?”

The ombudsman’s office gave the woman an answer with various theoretical recommendations in March. The ombudsman did not contact the prosecutor’s office or the police management, because the information received from the police, that in February the court declared Rusina wanted, made the office think that he will be found soon. In a telephone conversation with the representative of the Ombudsman’s office, the applicant also said that Rusiņš had not made any mention of himself for a few weeks.

The representative of the Office of the Ombudsman, Laila Gravere, criticizes policeman Belov’s answer to the woman as offensive: “This is such an attempt as if she herself were to blame for this action. Because nothing has been confirmed that she informed him or gave him her phone – on the contrary, she writes that she changed her phone number precisely to end communication. But he, I would even say, with such child abuse, approaching her eldest son and forcing him to reveal that phone. And a person can no longer ignore the numbers, it is already not normal – the perpetrator should be stopped and the victim should not be asked to isolate himself from the world.”

This week, several public organizations organized a picket near the Cabinet of Ministers, the reason for which was the murder on the Jēkabpils side. Iluta Lāce, head of the “Centrs Marta” association, calls the answer given by the police a vivid example of the fact that there is no mechanism for monitoring temporary protection measures in Latvia: “On the one hand, you submit and request temporary protection, on the other hand, you are also responsible for your own safety . There is no safety button, nothing like that. But we know that if the court examines applications for temporary protection in priority order, the court understands: this is a dangerous crime, it is necessary to act quickly. They do it within 24 hours. Then the same attitude should be applied to violations.” Lāce emphasizes that in the event of a threat to the life of a woman or her loved ones or persecution, the police should not hesitate to apply detention, arrest and, with the court’s sanction, also detention.

The murdered woman, as mentioned, also wrote to the Attorney General. Her letter to Stukan dated September 15 of last year began as follows: “Please, Mr. Prosecutor General, urgent and urgent help and protection against threats to life and health!”

If the politicians of different parties have reacted to the tragic event in Jēkabpils with amendments to the Criminal Law or the Criminal Procedure Law, then Prosecutor General Stukāns believes that the discussion is currently in the wrong direction: “It is time for Latvia to think about what we did to prevent this from happening. Why did Rusins ​​do what he did? Why do others target women, beat regularly and for a long time, and nothing changes? Why do priests commit crimes against children? Why do we have so much violent crime? Why do drunk drivers, despite, in my opinion, very heavy sanctions, continue to drink and drive? All of society needs to ask itself these questions. And we have to start with the fact that we have to create a mechanism so that the woman has opportunities to receive some kind of help so that this does not happen at all. (..) The police cannot protect women. Then it’s too late. When the police get involved, it means that the offense has already been committed.”

What exactly should be done, Stukāns does not know, because he is not a politician or a law enforcement officer, but a prosecutor – so his duties are to ensure the investigation of crimes that have already occurred, not the creation of a preventive mechanism.

Leon Rusiņš has still not been found, while Rolands Bērziņš, head of the East Zemgale station of the State Police, will lose his position regardless of the results of the service check. This was announced on Friday by the head of the State Police, Armands Ruks. In the meantime, the Internal Security Office informed that it will assess whether there has been inaction by police officials in Jēkabpils.