Pavel Milkin walked slowly along the sidewalk in front of his home this week, his left hand held as if grasping a little boy’s fingers.
He was retracing his footsteps in the Mill Creek cul-de-sac where he helped his grandson, Justin, learn to walk.
“Right here, his steps are all over,” Milkin said in his thick Russian accent.
“It is no longer,” he said. “It’s over.”
Milkin’s daughter-in-law, her sister and his grandsons Andrew, 3, and Justin, 5, were stabbed to death in their Kirkland home July 17. The killer then set the house on fire.
Olga Milkin, the boys’ mother, was 28. Her sister, Lyubov Botvina, was 24.
The family is taking the loss very hard, said Danny Milkin, 21, the youngest brother of Leonid Milkin, Olga’s husband, father to the boys and a sergeant in the National Guard. Danny Milkin lives with his parents in the Mill Creek home.
“I hope he burns in hell,” Danny Milkin said of the Kirkland neighbor charged in the killings. “He’s not worthy of forgiveness. I don’t want him to repent and ask for forgiveness, because he’ll get it. I don’t want him to have another chance.”
Conner Schierman, 24, has been charged in King County Superior Court with aggravated murder and arson.
Leonid Milkin and his wife and two boys lived in the Mill Creek house with their parents and Leonid’s siblings for about five years. They moved to Kirkland two years ago.
Leonid Milkin, 29, was serving in Iraq at the time of the killings. He has returned home on emergency leave. His family was looking forward to his scheduled homecoming in about six weeks.
Justin was proud of his father’s service in the military, Pavel Milkin said.
“We ask, ‘Justin, where’s your father?’ ‘He’s in the military service,’ ” the boy would reply.
Pavel Milkin, who goes by Paul, said there was irony in his son having survived nearly a year of warfare and terrorist bombings in Iraq only to lose his wife and children in a place that should have been safe – home.
Schierman reportedly told police he woke from a drunken blackout covered with blood, with the bodies next to him, then set fire to the house.
“He drinks for fun, just for fun, and take a life? That’s not good reason,” Milkin said.
Pavel Milkin, his wife Tatyana, their three sons and one daughter emigrated from the Ukraine to Estonia, then to the United States in 1989. Leonid is the oldest, Danny the youngest.
The family moved to Mill Creek 10 years ago. With the couple often working during the day, Danny Milkin, a Jackson High School grad who now attends Edmonds Community College, would come home from school and help take care of his nephews.
“At least three hours a day, minimum, I’d be with both of them,” he said.
The whole family helped raise the boys, Paul Milkin said. Tatyana would take them out in their stroller when they were very young.
Justin loved flowers. He would water the flowers in the front yard and was always giving them to family members.
The boys “were so loving and so sweet,” Danny Milkin said.
“Justin gave me lots of compliments about my dress, my look, my shoes,” Tatyana said. She was too upset to discuss her loss beyond that.
Olga was very friendly and open, said next-door neighbor Nadia Kitsak, who like the Milkins is Russian-Ukrainian. The family wonders if she opened the door to the killer, Kitsak said.
Botvina, Olga’s sister, attended the Christian Faith Center near Mill Creek, along with Danny. Known as Luba, she lived in Seattle but would come over and help care for the children as well, he said.
Tasha Madison of Mill Creek met Botvina at the church. She described her as her best friend.
“We did almost everything together,” Madison said. “She was a very sweet and generous person, a very inspiring person, especially in the sense that she always saw the good in everyone.”
Botvina, a student at Seattle Pacific University, was studying to be a hospital translator, Madison said.
Charles Denton, a pastor at the Christian Faith Center, said Botvina was very active in the church.
“She had a lot of good friends,” he said. “She was quite a dynamic young lady, really.”
Madison said while she’s angry about the murders, she’s trying to focus on Botvina’s life and the friendship the two shared.
“I know she’s at rest. That’s the only way I can even begin to make sense of it,” she said.
That’s a place the Milkin family has yet to reach.
“I loved them so much and they were taken away from me deliberately,” Danny Milkin said.
Bill Sheets is a reporter with The Herald in Everett.
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