Out of the six people who were murdered Tuesday in Fort Lauderdale and Sarasota, five were members of the same family.
Russell Kot, 51, who lived in Fort Lauderdale, killed Larisa Blyudaya, 46, and her 18-year-old son, Ben Azizov, according to police.
Police found their bodies inside Blyudaya’s town house on the 500 block of Northeast 15th Avenue in Fort Lauderdale’s Victoria Park neighborhood around 1:30 p.m. Tuesday after receiving a request for a welfare check.
It’s not clear when they were killed, and police have not released how Kot killed them.
Kot then drove to Sarasota County, a more than three-hour drive from Fort Lauderdale, and shot to death four more people before fatally shooting himself, according to the Sarasota Sheriff’s Office.
The victims there were Larisa’s mother, 66-year-old Florita Stolyar; her stepfather and Florita’s husband, 61-year-old Anatoly Ioffe; Larisa’s brother and Florita’s son, 39-year-old Yaroslav Blyudoy; and a 49-year-old woman named Olga Greinert.
Florita’s cousin, Marina Stolyar, confirmed to the Miami Herald the relationship between the victims and said Greinert was a family friend.
About an hour before police found the bodies of Blyudaya and Azizov, a woman living in the Sarasota neighborhood of Amberlea called 911 to report her neighbor lying bleeding and unconscious on his front lawn, according to records requested by the Herald.
She told the 911 operator that the man’s name was Tony and he was in his 60s. Anatoly Ioffe went by Tony on his social-media page.
“I heard a loud boom earlier, and I thought somebody dropped something, and I just walked outside, and my neighbor Tony is lying on the ground,” the woman told the 911 operator. “His house is open, and there’s blood all over his stomach.”
The woman and her adult son performed CPR on Ioffe until paramedics arrived, according to the call and a press release from the Sarasota Sheriff’s Office.
Deputies arrived and found two men and two women inside. One of the men was Kot, who detectives say shot himself after killing Blyudoy, Stolyar, Greinert and Ioffe.
As Sarasota detectives were trying to identify the victims in Amberlea, Fort Lauderdale police contacted them about the Victoria Park homicides and said they believed the killings were related, according to the sheriff’s office.
Detectives viewed security-camera and neighbors’ doorbell-camera footage to determine Kot drove into the subdivision just after 11 a.m. One camera recorded the sound of gunfire shortly after Kot’s car arrived, the sheriff’s office said.
About 40 minutes later, a man, likely Ioffe, was seen on the footage driving into the neighborhood. As he approached the front door to his house on Fallcrest Circle, he was shot. After that, the footage showed no one else entering or exiting the house, according to the sheriff’s office.
Marina Stolyar, Florita’s cousin, said she did not know Kot but heard from family members that he was the “very, very quiet type.” She thinks he came with Larisa when she moved to Fort Lauderdale from the Chicago area.
According to Kot’s LinkedIn page, he was an applications consultant for Allstate Insurance. According to his Facebook page, he was an avid sailor and bicyclist.
Blyudaya and Kot both lived in Cook County, Illinois. She lived there until 2024, according to a Nexis search, and he is still listed as having a home there. The two were Facebook friends at least until November, but Kot no longer appears on Blyudaya’s friends list.
A Fort Lauderdale neighbor told CBS News Miami that he saw someone go into the residence early in the morning.
“I was loading my tools, and I saw a guy running around here. He went to the driveway, hit the keypad, the door went up, I didn’t think anything of it,” said Mark Scinna, “Then I got a call about what had happened. I started tying everything together and said ‘Man, I hope that wasn’t the guy I saw.’ ”