OF THE
TIMES
Valeria was reported missing after leaving Sochi for Leningrad region (photo from vk.com)
Conversations with people who knew Valeria seem to show a few troubling alarm bells - but nothing to predict the horrifying atrocity she would be complicit in.
Ruptly found the girl's distressed mother, Nadezhda, who refused to say much, only mentioning that Valeria liked anime. Indeed, her purported page on VKontake (the top Russian social network) has pictures in the Japanese cartoon style all over it, some of a lewd nature.
"In class, she behaved like a normal student," Yuliya Myakisheva, Valeria's teacher, recalls. Studying was "hard for her," especially math, she sometimes "misbehaved during breaks" and wasn't very keen on school overall. Myakisheva remembers talking to Valeria's mother, who said it was "hard to deal" with the would-be cannibal.
Valeria once triggered a police search when she went missing during school holidays, the teacher said. And according to the family's neighbor Georgy, she would sometimes "go out at night, come back home late at night, or not at all." The 12-year-old "went out with boys," he believes.
The incident provoked outrage from the former French presidential candidate who called the attack a "gratuitous aggression," and added: "there was no fight ... there was an assault, a gratuitous assault on two young people aged 18 and 19."
"But this is not inevitable. This is, I believe, the consequence of political choices that have been made for a number of years," she continued, saying her daughter was in a state of shock about the attack but that she was relieved the incident was not more serious.
Comment: