On March 29th, Leonid Volkov, 37, brutally took the lives of his former employees, Kiryl Schukin, 37, and Pavel Vekshin, 28. Volkov stored the bodies in two large rubber bins in an iStorage facility in Brighton, Massachusetts.
This fateful event struck grief and worry into the hearts of Schukin and Vekshin’s friends and co-workers, who promptly filed a missing persons report just nine days after the crime was committed. The police acted swiftly and found the bodies after only five days of searching.
Schukin’s body was in pieces, and investigators stumbled upon discarded items such as rubber gloves and bleach when they peered into the storage unit.
A few months before the murders, he had been living in a Medford apartment that was due to be vacated. Schukin was initially Volkov’s guarantor on the apartment lease, according to him.
However, when the time came to extend the lease, Schukin would not provide the same services. As a result, Volkov was forced to part ways with his abode and face the looming reality of eviction.
Surveillance footage also shows Volkov entering and leaving the victims’ building multiple times in the days after they were last seen alive. Later, Volkov was seen renting a U-Haul from a storage unit business, presumably where he had decided to stow away the corpses.
With an ensuing murder charge, Volkov is set to have his first court hearing in this double homicide case on Tuesday. The Middlesex District Attorney’s Office and the Medford Police Department are still holding onto evidence discovered in the storage unit and continuing to seek justice for the victims and answers about what drove Volkov to such extremes.