Hella Nation - Evan Wright [77]
While Simberg waited, one of the young men in the apartment, most likely Drachev, put on a pair of brass knuckles and slammed Simberg in the back of the head.
When Britt clicked back to Simberg’s line, all he heard was screaming.
11. THE KILLERS
THE THREE YOUNG MEN who murdered Simberg are believed to have met through the local rave scene. Dennis Tsoukanov, the eldest at twenty, had immigrated to Phoenix with his family from Estonia fifteen years earlier. He grew up speaking fluent, unaccented English. His sister, Katie, two years younger, says that in high school Tsoukanov “was afraid of people, very shy.”
After graduating from high school, he worked as a clerk at a supermarket and studied graphic design at a community college. Tsoukanov’s sister says that then her brother changed: “He was like, ‘I’ve been missing out on the fun for all these years. I need to get out there and do fun stuff.’” She adds, “Everything changed. He started listening to techno and dressing in Abercrombie. He told me he wanted to be a model for Abercrombie.”
Tsoukanov began hanging out at the Buddha Lounge, a popular club frequented by Simberg as well as Chris Andrews and Mikhail Drachev. Chris Andrews was an eighteen-year-old freshman at Arizona State University in Tempe. Just five-five, and with barely any facial hair, he was sometimes mistaken for a fourteen-year-old. He had arrived at ASU in the fall of 2001 to study engineering. He was the son of a wealthy Maryland family. His father was an executive at IBM, his mother a teacher at a Montessori school. An ASU student who met him during freshman year says that Andrews bragged to him, “My parents are rich and buy me anything I want.”
A few months into his first year, Andrews was kicked out of student housing on suspicion of dealing coke. Shortly after that incident, the student who had reported him had his bicycle destroyed in a peculiar act of vandalism. It was doused in gasoline and set on fire. The student believed that the act was carried out by Andrews as retribution for snitching on him.
But true to Andrews’s boast, his parents bailed him out. His mother purchased him a new, $12,000 Kawasaki Ninja he had long coveted and rented an apartment for him in town. By then Andrews was hanging out with Mikhail Drachev. Eighteen years old, Drachev was still technically a student at North Phoenix High, but his parents had recently kicked him out of their house, and he moved in with Andrews. The two of them worked together as small-time drug dealers. Their apartment was filled with trays for growing hallucinogenic mushrooms and chemicals for manufacturing meth when police searched it after the death of Simberg.
Tsoukanov’s sister found her brother’s friendship with Drachev particularly disturbing. Unkempt and unsmiling, Drachev spit in her face, then laughed when she was introduced to him at a party. Tsoukanov’s sister says, “He was scary. I don’t know why my brother looked up to him, but he did.”
When police searched Drachev and Andrews’s apartment after the disappearance of Simberg on December 14, the walls were covered in blood-stains. Tsoukanov, who ended up confessing, confirmed that Simberg had indeed been struck from behind when speaking on the phone. According to Tsoukanov—whose account may be as self-serving as any co-conspirator’s in kidnapping and murder—Drachev and Andrews tied Simberg up and took turns beating him through the night. At one point, the killers left to purchase a handgun—the TEC-9—from some local white supremacist gun dealers Drachev knew. Early the next morning, they drove Simberg, bound and severely beaten but still conscious, a hundred miles to the Yavapai woods in