NEW YORK — The violent death at a New York nursing home of an 89-year-old holocaust survivor and great-grandmother, allegedly at the hands of her 95-year-old roommate, has left her family broken.
Police said they found 89-year-old Nina Kravtsov, who was born in Ukraine and was a Holocaust survivor, with head injuries in her room.
“The way she died is like in a Stephen King horror movie. This doesn’t happen in real life,” said the attorney for the victim’s family, Randy Zelin.
Kravtsov was rushed to the hospital, where she later died of blunt force trauma, the medical examiner said.
The alleged murder weapon was a leg rest from 95-year-old Galina Smirnova’s wheelchair that was found discarded outside of the building.
“She was asleep sometime around 9:00. And by 10:00, she was beaten to a pulp,” Zelin said.
According to prosecutors, she was discovered by a staff member at Seagate Nursing Home, washing blood off herself and around the room she had shared with Kravtsov for only two days.
Kravtsov’s family’s attorney, Randy Zelin, says dementia plays a legal role in this case in two ways.
First, in a likely civil suit against Seagate, which had been Kravtsov’s home for several years, arguing that it shouldn’t have paired a patient with dementia with a roommate in a brand new environment without some supervision.
And second, if the defense makes the case that Smirnova didn’t know what she was doing.
“Dementia can bring on unprovoked out of nowhere a fit of complete rage. So defensively, that’s the defense. Now it’ll be interesting to see how that plays in against the backdrop of apparently discarding the piece of the wheelchair, washing her hands in the bathroom. Now suddenly we begin to see maybe I do know what I was doing,” Zelin said.
She was arraigned on Wednesday morning in Brooklyn criminal court and is being held without bail.
Attorney Randy Zelin says a team at his office will be seeking justice for the family, looking to hold Seagate responsible, whether it could have prevented the tragedy with different protocols or staffing.
Our sister station WABC has reached out for comment from the nursing home.