On 3 February 2014, a school shooting occurred at School No. 263 in the Otradnoye District of Moscow, Russia. 15-year-old pupil Sergey Gordeyev, armed with a rifle, killed his geography teacher and held his classmates as hostages, before opening fire on first responders who arrived at the scene, killing a policeman and severely wounding a patrolman. In the following negotiations led by the perpetrator's father, the teenager released the hostages and was detained.
In September 2014, when the trial for the shooting case began in the Moscow's Butyrsky District Court, Gordeyev's defence team asserted that he was insane, and the state prosecution concurred. On March 3, 2015, the court sent Gordeyev to compulsory psychiatric treatment.
Despite the opposition from the victims' defence, the Moscow City Court declared in August 2015 that the decision was lawful. In November 2015, the Presidium of the Moscow City Court referred the matter to the Moscow District Military Court for reconsideration, and Gordeyev was again ruled insane on February 8, 2016.
The incident, which was the third fatal school shooting to occur in modern Russia, received wide resonance in Russian society and sparked debate regarding security systems in educational institutions, as well as the negative impact of films, television shows and video games containing scenes of violence.
Perpetrator
Sergey Viktorovich Gordeyev, a 15-year-old pupil of School No. 263 born on 4 October 1998 in Moscow, was identified as the shooter. A successful student of Class 10A, Gordeyev was aiming to graduate school with a gold medal and preparing to enroll into the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute. He was not known to any law enforcement agencies.
Since childhood, he was physically active and attended sambo lessons. He was also fond of video games, including Grand Theft Auto V, which he said had beneficial effects on him, because thanks to them he could be "distracted from the world and could distract himself from his grievances”.
Gordeyev's father, Viktor, was an employee of the Federal State Budgetary Institution Research Institute, supervised by law enforcement agencies. He had to resign from the service following the shooting. Together with his father, visited shooting ranges, where his father taught him how to shoot firearms. Gordeyev was a member of the "Vystrel" shooting club, and according to the testimony of one of the instructors, he shot "average" compared to professionals, but much better than any ordinary person. Gordeyev's mother, Irina, worked as an accountant and his grandmother, Lyubov Ivanovna, was a member of the class' parents' committee. Their family also includes a younger son, Ivan. It was previously reported that the Gordeyev's father and grandfather worked in state security agencies, but the FSB denied this information.
In an interview with Metro International, one of Gordeyev's classmates said that he had virtually no friends: "I would find it difficult to call him calm. That's not even the point. He was kind of strange, not like everyone else. He did not communicate with many people. It's hard to communicate with such people, in my opinion. Lately he's been sending me videos about weapons on VKontakte".
Mental state and motivations
I didn't want to kill anyone, I wanted to die. I was interested in finding out what would happen after? What is there - after death? I also wanted to see how people would react to what I was doing. I came to kill myself. I had no conflicts with Andrei Nikolaevich, on the contrary - we had a good relationship. When he came at me, I shot him - I don't even know why, maybe because no one would believe that I could shoot?
— An excerpt from Gordeyev's interview with Izvestia, published on 8 February, 2014
According to Gordeyev's defense, he was insane at the time the crime was committed. During interrogations, he confessed that he was driven to commit the crime in order to prove the theory of solipsism to his classmates and then commit suicide. At the age of ten, Gordeyev began to think that "life has no meaning, that the world is an illusion, a dream".
Vladimir Levin, the Gordeyev's lawyer, told journalists about his client: "He thinks that he has invented us all, that now he will close his eyes, and all those who are not interesting to him will disappear. He told his own mother that she was his illusion." Additionally, Levin had said that Gordeyev opened fire on the police because he was afraid that they would prevent him from proving his theory.
According to the victim's defense, he may have suffered from a mental disorder. However, the kind of disorder that did not deprive him of full or partial awareness of the actual nature and social repercussions of his actions. The defense argued that he was pushed to commit the crime, which he had planned in advance, caused by conflicts with his parents, teachers and classmates. Minister of Education Dmitry Livanov, however, claimed that Gordeyev did not have conflicts with students and teachers, the teenager himself noted in his testimony that there were conflicts, but they happened rarely, and in general relations in the class were friendly. If conflicts did arise, they were on domestic grounds or during an argument.
In conversation with his lawyer, Gordeyev told him about the conflict that occurred the day before the incident between Gordeyev, Russian language teacher Tatyana Babkina, and the principal, in which the principal was forced to call the school psychologist in order to calm Gordeyev, who had already begun to make threats. A video recording of a fight involving Gordeyev and his classmate, Aleksandr Petrov, appeared online, and according to the victim's defense, was presumably made several months before the shooting. Sergey's mother subsequently expressed opinion that this video was filmed while Gordeyev was in the 8th grade.
Tatyana Babkina, who taught Russian language and literature for Class 10A, spoke of Gordeyev as a kind, sympathetic and non-confrontational teenager. In an interview with LifeNews, Babkina told she was present during Gordeyev's interrogation at his request, saying:" We often discussed the topic of good and evil – I taught children mercy, and he said that it did not exist. When I told him that there are more kind people, he laughed." Shortly after the shooting Gordeyev said he wanted to "show her that she is wrong". According to media reports which appeared almost immediately after the incident, Gordeyev allegedly had a conflict with the killed teacher Andrei Kirillov over his grades.
On 8 February 2014, Gordeyev, while held in pretrial detention, was visited by a member of the Moscow Public Monitoring Commission and an actress Olga Dibtseva. According to Dibtseva, Gordeyev claimed that he did not want to kill anyone; when he entered the classroom with a gun, the teacher and the children did not believe that "he would be able to shoot".
Shooting
On Sunday, 2 February 2014, Gordeyev decided to commit the crime. He planned to come to school with a weapon, tell his classmates about his views on the theory of solipsism, and then commit suicide. That evening, he found out where his father hid the keys to the gun safe. He also sent some of his classmates SMS messages with the words “tomorrow you will be surprised at what I will do”.
On the morning of 3 February, Gordeyev lied to his parents that the first three lessons of the day were not being held, so that they would leave home and he could freely access the weapons. To make the lie more convincing, he had asked a classmate to send him an SMS message regurgitating the lie. Around that time, Gordeyev wrote a poem in English, in which he stated that he was tired of life and could "no longer live in fear". After his parents left, Gordeyev opened the safe and took out a .22 long Browning SA-22, a 7.62×51mm NATO Tikka T3 bolt action rifle with an optical sight, ammunition and a dagger which he found in the house. Before he put the weapons in cases, he used one of the rifles to fire a test shot through an open window. In order to conceal the weapons, Gordeyev wore a black fur coat with long flags which belonged to his mother.
Gordeyev left his house on Berezovaya Alley and around 11:40 a.m., approximately 10 minutes after the start of the fourth class, approached the central entrance, where he removed the weapons from their cases. He passed the turnstile at the entrance and threatened the security guard, he went to the first floor of the building and approached Room No. 2, where Class 10A had a geography class. Through the open door, Gordeyev, using the SA-22, shot the teacher Andrei Kirillov in the head and then pointed the gun at the students, amounted to around 20. Gordeyev, standing in front of the class, shared his thoughts on the theory of solipsism; his beliefs that only he existed in the world, and life was an illusory dream. At some point, he noticed that the wounded Kirillov began to show signs of life, and shot him in the head a second time, killing him.
Emergency response
The security guard called the police by pressing the school's panic button. The police received the alarm at 11:46, and about four minutes later a Non-Department Security of the National Guard squad arrived at the school. Warrant Officer Sergei Bushuyev and Warrant Officer Oleg Nurgaliev headed for Room No. 2, and Bushuyev tried to enter the room, at which point Gordeyev opened fire and wounded him. Nurgaliev immediately called an ambulance, but Bushuyev died from his wounds before the medics arrived.
Subsequently, the Post and Patrol Service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs arrived at the scene, and Gordeyev opened fire on the patrolmen from the window. After police entered the building, Senior Sergeant Vladimir Krohin saw the body of the dead warrant officer Bushuyev and stopped ten meters down the corridor diagonally from the classroom, at which point Gordeyev shot him through a crack in the half-open door. Krohin's partner, Junior Lieutenant Vyacheslav Nechayev Nechayev, risked his life by carrying his partner out from Gordeyev's view and dragging him around the corner.
At 12:12, several ambulance crews and two fire brigades arrived at the school, an air ambulance of the Russian Emergencies Ministry landed on the site next to the school, which subsequently evacuated the wounded officer Vladimir Krokhin on a stretcher at approximately 12:15. The school grounds were cordoned off by police, and the "Hurricane-2" plan was initiated, allowing security forces to use deadly force in the event the hostages lives get endangered during their release. Moreover, Mayor of Moscow Sergey Sobyanin, Minister of Internal Affairs Vladimir Kolokoltsev, Minister of Education Dmitry Livanov and Head of the Investigative Committee of Russia Alexander Bastrykin arrived at the scene.
According to eyewitnesses, Gordeyev talked to the hostages about death, his life, and family problems. He took phone calls from his parents several times, and after the helicopter landed, fired about 6 shots into the window. According to the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, during his time in the classroom, Gordeyev fired at least 11 shots, and according to his own confessions, made later during a psychiatric examination, 18 shots.
By 12:30, the majority of students in the school were evacuated. Throughout the evacuation, Gordeyev remained in the classroom with the hostages. At 12:17, Gordeyev's father was called in by special forces to negotiate with his son. He put on a bulletproof vest, entered Room No. 2, and persuaded his son to let his classmates go and surrender. Gordeyev released hostages at about 12:48, and a few minutes later, medics managed to move the body of the murdered teacher to the cloakroom on the first floor. Around 13:05, the shooter was taken out of the school by SOBR fighters.
Victims
The shooting left two people dead, a teacher of the school and a first responding policeman, additionally another emergency officer was left wounded but survived their injuries. The first victim was geography teacher Andrei Nikolaevich Kirillov. He was born in 1984 in the Vadsky District of the Nizhny Novgorod Region. After graduating from high school, he entered the Arzamas Pedagogical Institute, which he graduated from in 2006, and subsequently served in the Russian Armed Forces. Following his military career, he taught geography and biology in the senior grades of Secondary School No. 263. He was married and raised a son.
The second victim was Warrant Officer Sergei Viktorovich Bushuev, a policeman in a platoon of the 1st Police Battalion of the Non-Department Security of the National Guard for the North-Eastern Administrative District. The bullet fired by Gordeyev pierced the policeman's artery and entered his chest; Bushuev died from profuse bleeding. Before the incident, he had served in the internal affairs agencies since 1994, and in the battalion since 1997. While on service, he was awarded the departmental badges of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He was married and had a daughter.