Anastasia Shablykin knew there was something wrong about her brother with just one look of him enjoying an evening cigarette on her back patio.
‘That’s not my brother,’ she realized, and fearing for the safety of her 11-year-old daughter Anna, ordered him out of the house or she would call the cops.
Aleksandr Aleksand Shablykin, 32, was off his bipolar meds, which she knew made him so delusional he believed he was the Egyptian god of death.
Just hours after his sister kicked him out, Shablykin stabbed his mother Zoya, 52, to death and went on a knife rampage down her quiet street.
By the time police showed up at the cul-de-sac in Gig Harbor, Washington, at 9.33am on Tuesday, Zoya and three others – Joanne Brandani, Louise Talley, and Stephanie Killilea – were dead.
Pierce County Sheriff’s deputies arrived seconds too late to save the final victim, and one of them shot Shablykin dead as he charged at him.
Zoya was killed while on the phone to her elderly mother Luba, after Shablykin locked her outside and started performing occult rituals and torturing her cat.
‘She was talking to Zoya and all of a sudden she hears a Zoya let out a bloodcurdling scream,’ Anastasia told the Daily Mail.
Zoya Shablykin, 52, (right) was stabbed to death by her son outside her home on Tuesday morning. Her daughter Anastasia, 30, (left) survived
Zoya with her 11-year-old granddaughter, who was not present during the stabbing spree
‘She could hear them arguing and then the phone just dropped. The Aleks said “whoa”. He got a high from killing her, I think. Disgusting.’
Luba heard nothing else until the phone was picked up by a police officer.
Anastasia, 30, and her car salesman boyfriend Rob Knowles, 59, called all five deaths a tragedy as the troubled young man was a ‘really nice guy’ when taking his medication.
The heartbroken sister insisted the man who slaughtered her mother and three others wasn’t her brother, he was ‘something else, something evil’.
‘I’m up and down. Sometimes it’s unbearable,’ Anastasia said of her emotions. ‘But I have to be strong for Anna. That is what she would have wanted.
‘I loved my brother. Now I don’t have him, or my mom, or a father.’
Zoya was forced to kick him out of her home and get a restraining order last April, claiming he told her, ‘Your grave has been dug up.’
But Anastasia insisted Zoya never gave up on her son.
‘She was a godly woman. She loved Jesus, she loved her family, she enjoyed gardening, cooking, baking, arts and crafts,’ Anastasia said.
‘She loved her son… She died loving him.’
Zoya loved her family so much that she brought her two small children to the US from a tiny dirt-poor village in Siberia with little more than the clothes on their backs after her husband took his own life.
‘I think that he probably had whatever Aleks has too, I don’t know,’ Knowles said.
Aleksandr Shablykin, 32, (pictured right with Anna as a toddler left) was a ‘really nice guy’ when taking his medication and beloved by his niece – but quickly descended into madness if he went off them
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Shablykin went into the Wellfound Behavioral Health Hospital in Tacoma last April, until he was stable on medication that prevented his delusions.
He came to live with Anastasia and Knowles and their daughter in the garage of their home in Orting, Washington.
Knowles said they had to give him a place to live because he was family, but also that if he was on the street he wouldn’t take his medication.
‘He’d turn into Osiris,’ he said.
‘He was such a nice guy when he was on his meds I really enjoyed him being there. Anna talked to him a lot and she, she trusted her uncle she really loved him.
‘She’s getting older and she kinda pushes away from her dad now and but Aleks is her confidant, she’s always just talked to Aleks and he was just accepting of her no matter what.’
That was until the weekend, when Shablykin began to seem a little off. ‘I started to see subtle things,’ Knowles said.
Shablykin started smoking, which he never did. Knowles saw him on the patio late at night having a cigarette, when his medication would usually make him tired and go to bed early.
Knowles wrote it off as being caused by the smoking. But by Monday evening about 8 or 8.30pm he subconsciously realized something wasn’t right.
‘Me and the girls probably dodged a bullet with him. If I hadn’t identified that night that he was off, who knows what could have happened,’ he recalled.
Anastasia with her boyfriend Rob Knowles, 59, and their daughter 11-year-old daughter Anna
Anastasia had the awful task of telling her grandmother – Zoya’s mother – that her daughter was dead
He asked Shablykin if he was taking his medication and Alex wouldn’t answer, even when he was asked five or six more times.
Anastasia came outside and knew immediately and said, ‘That’s not my brother.’
She told the Daily Mail that was because she had seen Shablykin in the depths of his psychotic episodes, and he looked the same.
Anastasia looked at his computer and could see he was back to looking at Egyptian mythology, which showed he was falling into his delusions of being Osiris, the god of death and the underworld.
She told him again he had to leave or she was calling police, but Shablykin tried to turn the tables on them.
‘He was trying to tell me that I needed to leave, kind of what he did with his mom. He was like, “call whoever you want, call the president I don’t care”,’ Knowles said.
‘His respect was gone for Rob, and he wouldn’t give us a straight answer. Rob got in his face and he didn’t even flinch,’ Anastasia added.
‘His responses were disrespectful. He just didn’t care about anything. He told Rob to get out of his house when we told him to take his meds or to go.’
Zoya had a long-haired Siamese named Pushok that Anastasia bought her. She adored her pet and it was her emotional support, but Shablykin hated it because she loved it so much
The family later found blood on the floor of the house and lots of fur from the cat, which is still missing
Knowles tried to lock Shablykin outside but he got into the garage, packed a backpack, and drove away about 9pm before the police arrived within five minutes.
‘I didn’t really think he’d go to his mom’s house, because he’d go to jail, right? But Anastasia knew he would,’ he said.
‘He never drove his car, it’s a pile, the windows are out of it. It would be freezing that day by the time he got there.’
They called Zoya to warn her and she later told them Shablykin arrived that night and she gave him tea and a blanket and he left. But then he returned the next morning.
Zoya let him in out of kindness, but then he forced her out of her own home, as he did when she filed her restraining order last year.
Her petition claimed at the time that Shablykin was ‘doing witchcraft/occult behavior and doing rituals in my home, damaging personal belongings’.
‘He doesn’t want to work or learn, thinks he has a freedom to do what he wants and have everything in my house because he thinks it belongs to him.’
Zoya called her daughter from her back patio as they made the two-hour drive to Gig Harbor from Orting, saying she was locked outside.
‘Anastasia is telling her, “don’t go back in the house, Mom,” but her cat is in there,’ Knowles recalled.
Zoya took out the protection order against her son last April, claiming he ‘believed he was an Egyptian god’ and performed ‘occult rituals’ as he threatened his family for years and injured her cat
Zoya was granted a protective order after he pushed her and told her, ‘Your grave has been dug up,’ according to court documents
Zoya he a long-haired Siamese named Pushok that Anastasia bought her. She adored her pet and it was her emotional support, but Shablykin hated it because she loved it so much.
What happened after that is not clear but Knowles speculates Shablykin started torturing the cat, as he did last time he was off his meds.
‘Zoya might may have looked in and seen him doing that and maybe got help from one of the neighbors,’ Anastasia said.
Luba called them after Zoya was stabbed, but the connection was bad and they couldn’t work out if she was saying ‘your brother is killing your mom’ or that he had ‘killed your mom’, and whether she meant it literally or figuratively.
Zoya’s neighbor earlier told the Daily Mail how he saw her being attacked on the back patio and ran outside to help what he thought was a dog mauling.
But when he ran into the unfenced backyard of Zoya’s home, he realized she was being stabbed a dozen times by her son, who then chased him to his door and tried to barge his way inside.
‘He had this distant look on his face, he was very calm, composed, very serious, even his gait… he didn’t seem full of unbridled rage,’ he said.
Knowles said the tragic chain of events began when he became suspicious that Shablykin was off his medication, and confronted him
Deputies found Zoya Shablykin, 52, and three others outside, one lying in the middle of the quiet cul-de-sac a few miles from the Puget Sound
Knowles claimed police refused to tell them whether Zoya was alive for hours after they finally arrived at the scene, now swarming with police.
They later found blood on the floor of the house and lots of fur from the cat, which is still missing.
Knowles believes Shablykin’s psychotic episode was the result of a tragic attempt to wean himself off the medication, which he had talked about months earlier.
‘His sister thought that maybe I would be a mentor for him and help get him going in life but the guy had no motivation, he was perfectly content to just sleep in the garage… he didn’t want to get a job,’ he said.
Anastasia said a condition of Shablykin living with them was that he would stay on his medication, and they even let him freeload off them.
‘It was either homelessness or stay with us. He didn’t have to do anything. He thought everything needed to be handed to him,’ she said.
‘He didn’t want to do anything but sit in the garage on his computer. He didn’t want to talk to people or go out he didn’t want to do anything.
‘He didn’t even want to go to the store, he just ordered organic food online.’
Shablykin’s plan was to get on disability and get government housing, but this was thrown into disarray a few weeks earlier by the government refusal – which would also see his welfare payments cut.
Shablykin was shot by one of the deputies and died at the scene along with three of the victims, the sheriff said
Three adults were killed at the scene. Paramedics took a fourth victim to a nearby hospital in critical condition, where they later died from their injuries
Knowles believed this led Shablykin to believe he didn’t need his medication, and he planned to use a family holiday to get off them.
‘I was supposed to be taking Anastasia to Cabo on Sunday and when we were packed and waiting for a ride to the airport, all of a sudden she just locked down and she said she did not wanna leave Anna,’ Knowles said.
‘It was like a sixth sense or something. We canceled the trip and stayed home, thank God.’
Anastasia explained to the Daily Mail that she ‘just had a feeling’ about how her brother was acting that made her not want to leave her daughter alone with him.
Anastasia couldn’t bring herself to tell Anna, who was already asking where her uncle was, what happened until Wednesday after Luba flew in from Kentucky.
The family has launched a fundraiser to pay for two funerals and help Anastasia and her daughter with counseling.
