Professional athletes are not immune to accidents. Kazakh world weightlifting champion Evgeny Galuzinsky went to the store at night, not suspecting that the walk would be fatal for him.
The athlete died on the way to the hospital.
History of victories
Galuzinsky’s career rise came quite quickly. Already at the age of 17 he won the World Junior Championships in Brazil, setting a world record in the weight category up to 74 kg. He then took bronze at the World Junior Championships in Poland, as well as multiple victories at the national level.
Zhenya was a good guy: kind and understanding. By the age of 25 he had already married and was raising a daughter. At the same time, he continued to pay close attention to the sport: he trained hard and constantly focused on results.
Unfortunately, the tragic event of 2017 cut short the life of the Kazakh hero in his prime. One afternoon, Galuzinsky was walking with a friend and came across a group of drunks…
Photo source: social networks of Evgeny Galuzinsky.
“Zhenya, run!”
Galuzinsky and his friend Oleg Boyko were near a store in Kokshetau and were waiting for their friend in a car. At that moment, a group of drunk young men approached them. As it turned out later, they were students of a local university. They began to bother Zhenya and Oleg.
“Everyone passed by, two returned and for some reason bothered Zhenya:” Why do you look like that? Zhenya replied: “I didn’t look at you at all.” I say, “Calm down guys, we’re waiting for the car.” They didn’t listen to me, they started fighting, I started separating them. Then I see: the rest, about four, are running towards us. I shout: “Zhenya, run,” Boyko told Sputnik Kazakhstan.
Boyko attempted to ask the store’s security guard for help, but he refused, citing the fact that he could not leave his post. The man didn’t even give Oleg his phone number to call the police. When Boyko ran out into the street, he saw that his partner was lying on the ground. He was stabbed four times.
“They handed Zhenya over to him, he was covered in blood. He said that he couldn’t speak, that he had trouble breathing. The ambulance took him to the city hospital and I went with the police to look for these thugs. When the police arrived at the hospital, they said that Zhenya had died from blood loss,” Oleg said.
One of the attackers was caught being chased using CCTV cameras. The tragedy shocked everyone who knew Galuzinsky. The sports school where he studied said that they would closely follow the progress of the investigation so that “the young bastards are punished according to the law.”
Photo source: gov.kz
severe punishment
Soon all the bandits were in the dock. The direct murderer was sentenced to 15 years in prison in a maximum security prison colony. His two accomplices were sentenced to two years. The criminals also had to pay the family of the murdered more than 2.5 million tenge (about half a million rubles). However, this money could not compensate for the loss of a loved one.
— Zhenya loved my daughter and me very much. And we are yours. But how ridiculous the circumstances sometimes are! A few days before the murder we had a fight with him, I decided to teach him a lesson, punish him with a little separation. Very little, because she was sure that we would be together until old age,” Galuzinsky’s wife Daria told Sputnik Kazakhstan.
A little later, evidence began to appear that Galuzinsky himself was not entirely clean. It turned out that the athlete was prosecuted twice. In 2016, he was caught stealing oxygen cylinders from a children’s hospital. The matter was silenced: the parties reached reconciliation. The weightlifter was then caught stealing personal property from the Ardager produce company.
Deputy regional police chief Erbol Zhusupov told the Interfax-Kazakhstan agency that Galuzinsky recently stopped playing sports and did not work anywhere. The athlete may have gone down a bad path, and the attack on him was not just a random street fight. However, now almost no one will think about it.
