Karlik gets 6 life sentences for Oshrenko murders

Prosecutors had asked court to give murderer one life sentence for each of the six family members he killed.

By JOANNA PARASZCZUK
Dimitry Kirilik 311 (photo credit: YAAKOV LAPPIN)
Dimitry Kirilik 311
(photo credit: YAAKOV LAPPIN)
Damian Karlik looked on impassively as the Central District Court handed down six life sentences on Tuesday, one for each of the six members of the Oshrenko family he murdered.
The 39-year-old sat upright in the dock, flanked by Prisons Service guards, and did not appear to flinch as judges Avraham Tal, Ruth Lorch and Tsvi Dotan read out the sentence.
RELATED:Prosecutors want 6 life sentences for Oshrenko massacre
Tal reminded the court that Karlik had been found guilty of the October 2009 murders of Ludmilla and Edward Oshrenko, both 56; their son Dmitry and his wife Tatiana, 32 and 28; and their children Revital, three, and Nataniel, three months old.
“The defendant took the lives of three generations of the Oshrenko family: the grandmother and grandfather, the parents and their children, who were asleep in their beds as he stabbed each one multiple times,” Tal said.
Karlik was also found guilty of robbing Edward Oshrenko and of attempting to destroy evidence of the murders.
“Karlik was not satisfied with taking the lives of the Oshrenko family,” the judge said. “As he had planned, he set fire to a towel in the kitchen and managed to burn part of the apartment to remove traces of himself, then stole cash from Edward and Dmitry.”
Afterwards, Karlik asked his wife, Natalia, and his father to hide his bloody clothes and the knife he had used to kill the Oshrenkos, the judge said.
After the murders, Karlik and his wife initially fled to Taba in Egypt via Eilat, planning to fly from there to Russia, but were arrested when they recrossed the border into Israel.
Karlik’s co-defendant, his wife Natalia, was charged alongside her husband in connection with the murders. She was sentenced to 13 years of imprisonment last November after being convicted in a plea bargain of manslaughter, conspiracy to commit a crime and destroying evidence.
According to the indictment, Tal recalled, the motive for the massacre had been Karlik’s increased hatred of the Oshrenkos, after they fired him from a wait-staff job at their Rishon Lezion family-owned restaurant, the Premier, in 2008.
Karlik’s wife, Natalia, began working at the restaurant soon afterwards, and the couple began to plot revenge, at first deciding to rob the restaurant.
To carry out the robbery, Natalia stole the Oshrenkos’ keys and copied them.
The robbery plans instead resulted in a bloody massacre.
Shortly before 2 a.m. on October 17, 2009, Karlik went to the Oshrenkos’ apartment.
First, he woke Ludmilla, the family’s grandmother, stabbing her in the stomach as she cried for help.
After the first murder, Natalia telephoned her husband and told him that the rest of the Oshrenkos were on their way home. Damian Karlik brutally stabbed Ludmilla’s husband Edward and then Tatiana as they arrived at their apartment.
Tatiana’s three-month-old baby Nataniel then woke up and began to cry. Karlik strangled the baby, then picked him up and threw him so hard against the floor that his skull was fractured.
Karlik then stabbed the baby to death.
After murdering Nataniel, Karlik stabbed the child’s sister, Revital.
The last member of the family to die was Dmitry.
Karlik lay in wait for him, and when he came home, at 6 a.m., he unleashed a frenzied knife attack against his former employer, stabbing him at least 38 times. He then set fire to the apartment, after stealing cash belonging to the Oshrenkos.
In addition to the six life sentences, the court also sentenced Karlik to an additional 10 years in prison, to run concurrently with his life sentences, for robbery and plotting a crime.
The judges said they did not accept a request by Karlik’s defense attorney, Uri Keynan, to refrain from imposing additional penalties on top of those for the murder charges, on the grounds that the arson, robbery and conspiracy charges were “an integral part of the events” of the murders.
In addition, Karlik was ordered to pay compensation totaling NIS 458,000 to various relatives of the Oshrenko family, including Jana Oshrenko, the daughter of Ludmilla and Edward Oshrenko.
The court said the sum of NIS 16,646 it had confiscated after the government sold Karlik’s car would be forfeited to the state.
After the sentence was read, Karlik whispered briefly to his interpreter before Prisons Service guards led him out of the dock.
Outside the courtroom, Karlik’s defense attorney told reporters that the defense team planned to study the sentence in full before deciding within a month whether to appeal to the Supreme Court.
Keynan said the sentencing had come very soon after the verdict but declined to discuss any aspect of his client’s case with the media.
Karlik denies murdering the Oshrenkos, although he admits to being present at the time of the killings. Karlik testified in his own defense that another man, whose identity is unknown, murdered the family.