Ukrainian Man Finds Out His Wife and Children are Dead After Seeing Their Bodies in Viral Photo
Cliff Levy/Twitter
A Ukrainian father and husband told the New York Times he discovered his family had died earlier this week when he saw an image of their bodies online.
Pulitzer-winning photojournalist Lynsey Addario was near a bridge crossing into Kyiv from Irpin on Sunday when a mortar shell from Russian troops killed four civilians.
She was captured on video rushing toward the site of the explosion. A man was dead on the street, as was a woman and her two children.
Addario tweeted a photo of the deceased, which made its way onto the front page of the Times on Monday.
WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES: Today I witnessed Russian troops deliberately targeting civilians fleeing for their lives from the village of Irpin. At least three members of a family of four were killed in front of me. @nytimes https://t.co/lR0a5FRpXX
— lynsey addario (@lynseyaddario) March 6, 2022
She later told CBS News: “It’s disrespectful to take a photo, but I have to take a photo. This is a war crime.”
The image has been everywhere from cable news to the depths of social media.
The dead have since been identified as Tetiana Perebyinis, her children Mykyta and Alisa and a friend named Anatoly Berezhnyi.
The Times reported how Serhiy Perebyinis, the husband to Titiana and father of Mykta and Alisa, found out his wife and children had been killed:
Through [Saturday night], Mr. Perebyinis had tried to monitor his wife’s location using a locator app on their phones. But it showed nothing: the family was in a basement, without cell reception.
Around dawn, he said, he saw one ping, showing them at their home address. But nothing showed them moving. Cellphone coverage had become too spotty in the town.
The next ping of a location on Mr. Perebyinis’ phone came around 10 Sunday morning. It was at Clinical Hospital No. 7 in Kyiv. Something had gone wrong.
He called his wife’s phone number and she did not answer, nor did his children. Serhiy told the Times that 30 minutes after placing the calls, he saw on Twitter that a family had been killed while attempting to flee Irpin.
Heartbreaking:
The photo of a deadly Russian mortar attack on a fleeing family outside Kyiv shocked the world.
This is their story. Please read.
By @AndrewKramerNYT. https://t.co/mz0AFLePTy pic.twitter.com/dMMLAHSUqg— Cliff Levy (@cliffordlevy) March 9, 2022
That was when he came across Addario’s photo, which confirmed the worst.
“I recognized the luggage and that is how I knew,” he told the Times:
“We were married for 23 years and refurbished three apartments and never argued once.”
