Oleksiy Kuchapin, an activist helping homeless people in Kyiv, was found dead on July 21 after being missing for days.
Although the police preemptively said it was a non-violent death, his fellow activists suspect that Kuchapin was murdered. They distrust the official investigation, saying that the deceased had a strained relationship with the police, who were annoyed by his activism and allegedly threatened members of his charity organization.
The police deny the accusations and say that the death is being investigated properly.
A number of circumstances of Kuchapin’s disappearance and death led his friends to suspect that he was killed. Now they are rallying to demand justice.
Disappearance
Kuchapin, 39, was the founder of House of Mercy (Dim Myloserdya), a charity that helped homeless people in Kyiv.
According to various estimates, from 5,000 to 20,000 homeless people live in Kyiv, but there are very few organizations that help them. Kuchapin’s was one of them.
Among other things, House of Mercy ran a small shelter for elderly homeless people. According to Kuchapin’s friends, during the COVID-19 lockdown earlier this year, he would rent apartments to give shelter to the homeless.
Kuchapin disappeared on July 16, after telling his colleagues and family that he would be taking a trip to the city of Dnipro by BlaBlaCar, a carpooling app and website. That was the last they heard from him.
“He didn’t just go off the radar, but for some strange reason, his number disappeared off of all of our secret volunteer groups (on messenger apps),” his friend and activist Zakharia Kerstyuk wrote on Facebook four days after Kuchapin disappeared but before his body was found.
His phones were off and the website of his organization went down. Moreover, his friends said that the police were able to confirm that BlaBlaCar never received an order for a ride from him in July.
His friends were alarmed.
According to Kerstyuk, before his disappearance Kuchapin was looking into alleged cases of child trafficking that exploited orphan girls. He was also trying to help some elderly people to get back their apartments they lost due to fraud.
Kerstyuk said that he and other activists received death threats from police officers for feeding and sheltering homeless people at the Kyiv central railway station, a busy transport juncture popular among the city’s homeless.
The activist alleged that the police were in some way profiteering off homeless people, making them beg for money or trafficking them. The activists were in the way, he claims.
The Kyiv Police press office refused to immediately comment on these allegations and requested a formal written request for information.
The body found
Kuchapin’s body was found on July 22, six days after the disappearance, in a rented apartment in Kyiv. The police said preemptively that there were “no signs of a violent death.”
But because of how mysteriously Kuchapin disappeared, his friends were skeptical about the police’s conclusions.
That skepticism grew when activist organization Bezdomie.ua released photos of what it says is a couch from the rental apartment where Kuchapin was found.
The photos show a broken-apart couch covered in reddish-brown stains resembling blood, left near garbage dumpsters.
In the description under the photos, the Bezdomie.ua, which has nearly 80,000 followers on Instagram, accused the police of throwing out the couch evidence because they’re not interested in investigating the suspicious death of an activist who, the account says, was disliked by the authorities for exposing their mistreatment of the homeless.
They added that, prior to his disappearance, Kuchapin was feeling happy and fulfilled. His daughter was born in early July, just 10 days before he went missing.
His friends say that the barrage of death threats Kuchapin had received for his work should demonstrate that foul play led to his death.
The police deny accusations of negligence and say they are investigating the case properly.
Police’s version
In a press release on July 23, the police addressed the accusations of negligence brewing among the public.
The authorities say that Kuchapin rented the apartment on July 15, at which point the owner warned that technicians would need to come within the next few days to install an air conditioner.
However, after the lease was signed, Kuchapin never got in contact with the owner. Because Kuchapin’s key was still in the lock from the inside, the owner wasn’t able to access the property. When the authorities broke into the apartment, they found Kuchapin’s decomposing body on the couch alongside 11 white pills of an unknown substance and a suicide note.
As for the alleged blood stains on the couch, officials say they are not what they seem.
“The most important thing that needs to be set aside is the stains on the discarded couch,” says Artem Shevchenko, the Interior Ministry’s spokesperson. “These stains are yet to be fully examined by the toxicologists, but, according to our crime scene analysts, the stains are a result of natural decomposition. You have to understand — the body spent five days in an apartment where the windows were closed, no air conditioning was installed and the average temperature inside would be about 25 degrees Celsius.”
Shevchenko added that a key witness had been interviewed — a woman who was present in the apartment the night before Kuchapin’s death. According to her statements, Kuchapin was in distress and confided in her, expressing his suicidal thoughts.
Additionally, Shevchenko stated that all possible biological evidence was collected off the couch, and only after that was the couch thrown away at the wish of the apartment owner.
After the police released their statement explaining their version of Kuchapin’s death, his friend Kerstyuk once again expressed his distrust in the police investigation. He said he didn’t understand how the previously deactivated website of Kuchapin’s foundation was back up and running, as well as his Facebook pages.
Matthew Steiner, a senior crime scene analyst based in the United States, points out that when the cause of the death isn’t immediately clear, it is normal to secure the scene — something that wasn’t made in the case of Kuchapin’s death.
“A response back to the scene might not be necessary if the death is deemed to be natural or an accident or suicide,” says Steiner. “But further processing would be required if it was a homicide scene. That means it had to be secure; no unauthorized people in or out and the scene should remain intact (certainly wouldn’t throw out furniture). That couch could be a great source of trace transfer DNA.”
Steiner also noted that the announcement of Kuchapin’s death before completion of an autopsy was ignorant, as all investigations should first be investigated as a homicide, without the potential influence of assumptions on the course of the investigation.
