Nestor Shufrych, the son and namesake of the lawmaker with Opposition Bloc faction, struck a pedestrian while driving a Bentley car in a crosswalk late on Aug. 26 in Kyiv. The victim is hospitalized with multiple injuries.
Several eyewitnesses reported that the accident occurred on Shota Rustaveli Street and Shufrych’s car was moving at a high speed.
Moshe Azman, Ukraine’s chief rabbi, wrote on Facebook that his son Mendel gave first aid to the victim. The accident occurred near the central Kyiv synagogue. The victim, a 31-year-old man, suffered a head injury and fractures of a forearm and legs, the police said.
The Kyiv police reported that Shufrych, 23, was not drunk. He stayed at the scene and cooperated with the investigation.
“At the same time he was tested to check on whether he was intoxicated with drugs,” the police report said, without giving results of the test.
Lawmaker Shufrych’s press service reported that it wasn’t his son’s car. He borrowe a Bentley at a car showroom to make a video clip of his friend and a hip-hop/rap musician known as Pabl.A.
“The accident occurred when Shufrych Jr. was driving to return the car to the car showroom. The performer (Pabl.A) was sitting in a front passenger seat at that moment,” Shufrych’s press service said on the Facebook page.
The police seized the car and opened a criminal probe against Shufrych Jr. on violation of the traffic safety rules, which may lead to a fine and civil works or up to six months of the arrest or a requirement for him to live at the place of registration for up to three years.
A lawmaker from People’s Front Anton Herashchenko, who is also an advisor of Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, said told 112 TV Channel that Shufrych Jr. would likely be fined and receive a suspended sentence “considering that the son of Shufrych wasn’t previously convicted nd had no problems with the law before.”
Kyiv police spokeswoman Oksana Blyshchyk told the Kyiv Post that Shufrych Jr. is now being checked by investigators.
Lawmaker Shufrych, who was one of the allies of the ousted President Viktor Yanukovych, announced through his press service that he was ready to pay for treatment of the victim.
Shufrych also assured that his son would not try to flee the nation.
There have been multiple cases in Ukraine when children of Ukraine’s rich elites were not punished, even after killing people in car accidents.
In 2007, Serhiy Kalynovsky, the former stepson of oligarch Dmytro Firtash, Shufrych’s colleague in Yanukovych’s party, at a high speed ran into a parked car, killing two people in Kyiv. Despite a criminal case against him, Kalynovsky disappeared abroad and was arrested in Kyiv only in 2015.
In June 2011, Nataliya Solovey, a judge’s assistant, ran over and killed a woman while parking her expensive Mercedes jeep on a sidewalk in Kyiv. In November 2011, Solovey was granted amnesty and released. Her criminal case was closed.
