The mothers of two unarmed young men killed by the same policeman in southern Virginia four years apart met for the first time on Tuesday evening, as the officer prepared to stand trial for murder.
Sallie Chapman and Yelena Denyakina embraced, cried and laughed as they remembered their eldest sons, William and Kirill, who were shot dead in contentious circumstances by Stephen Rankin in the city of Portsmouth.
“We will get through this together and we will get justice together,” Chapman told Denyakina, on the eve of Rankin’s trial. “I’m so sorry that this has happened again,” she said.
Denyakina, who has flown the 6,000 miles from her native Kazakhstan to be in the public gallery at Portsmouth circuit court, told Chapman: “I just wish that he had been jailed before your son was killed, too.”
Rankin, 36, is charged with murdering William Chapman in the parking lot of a Walmart store on 22 April last year. He denies the charge and says that he fired in self-defense during a struggle that ensued when he tried to arrest Chapman, 18, on suspicion of shoplifting. Rankin’s trial is scheduled to commence with jury selection on Wednesday morning.
Rankin shot Chapman one day short of four years after he killed Kirill Denyakin, 26, on a residential street about 2.5 miles away, in April 2011. He said Denyakin charged toward him and reached for his waistband as Rankin investigated a complaint that Denyakin was banging on the door of an apartment building. Denyakin was shot 11 times. A grand jury declined to charge Rankin.
The mothers of the two men, who had never previously spoken, met as the sun set on Tuesday evening at a riverside park beside the Renaissance hotel, where Kirill Denyakin worked as a cook.
Speaking in Russian through a friend who translated, Denyakina, 52, told the Guardian she was determined to support Sallie through the trial. “I feel her pain and I understand that we share a big problem,” she said. “I hope that if we are united our spiritual strength will be increased.” Denyakina stroked Chapman’s hands and told her: “You are very strong.”
Minutes before their meeting, Sallie, 36, said she felt sick with nerves. “I’ve thought of her son every day since I found out that the same officer killed them both,” she said. Sallie told Yelena that on the anniversary of William’s death she had set two balloons off into the sky – one for each of their sons.
Both mothers expressed concern that one officer could twice kill people who were not carrying weapons. “Anybody can just shoot a gun. But police departments need to analyze better who these people are that they are hiring,” said Sallie. “You can’t just pick anybody. And Stephen Rankin was just anybody.”
Yelena said: “People like that should not be in the police.”
Rankin’s defense team insists that he acted with justification. At least one witness has said that Chapman knocked a Taser from Rankin’s hand as the pair struggled and that the 18-year-old was acting combatively. Rankin’s attorneys are expected to cite any juvenile criminal records Chapman had as proof of aggressive tendencies.
Judge Johnny E Morrison has ruled that prosecutors may not directly tell jurors that Rankin killed Denyakin. At a final pretrial hearing on Tuesday, however, Morrison said they could use a recording from Rankin’s Taser camera in which he can be heard telling a witness “this is my second one” seconds after he shot Chapman.
The officer was removed from street patrols and restricted to desk duty for about two and a half years after shooting Denyakin – an extraordinary measure for an officer deemed by authorities to have used deadly force appropriately.
The jury in a $22m civil lawsuit brought by Denyakin’s family also ruled in support of the officer. By then, Rankin had used an online pseudonym to post disparaging remarks about Denyakin on a local newspaper website. “22 mil wont buy your boy back,” he wrote. He also noted that most Americans couldn’t hope to earn such sums in an entire career, “let alone a habitual drunk working as a hotel cook”.
Rankin was also chided by police chiefs when he publicly referred on Facebook to his firearms case as “Rankin’s box of vengeance” and said: “Would be better if i was dirtying them instead of cleaning them!” At one point, his Facebook avatar was a screen print of a photograph depicting a Serb left hanging from a lamp-post by invading Nazi forces in 1943.
“If I had to choose one word to describe him it would be ‘uncompassionate’,” Sallie said of Rankin on Tuesday evening. “I have other things I would like to say, but let’s say that for now.”
Denyakina said she had recently imagined she was with Kirill in a dream, and that he had expressed amazement that Rankin had not been convicted of a crime. “I miss my son so much. I dream of him all the time,” she said, her voice cracking.
Earl Lewis, a cousin of Sallie who has acted as a family spokesman and accompanied her to the meeting, wept as he told Denyakin’s mother that he had met her son while dining at the hotel’s restaurant years ago. “He was unarmed just like William was,” said Lewis, as Denyakina placed a hand on his shoulder in sympathy. “It broke my heart that justice was not given to this mother.”
Rankin, who is currently free on bail, was terminated from his job by the Portsmouth police department following the fatal shooting of Chapman. A US navy veteran, he is charged with first-degree murder and using a firearm in the commission of a felony.
The decision by local authorities to prosecute Rankin for Chapman’s shooting followed extensive coverage of the shooting by the Guardian in connection with an continuing project to document every killing by law enforcement officers in the US.
