Nursing Home Resident, 95, Found Washing Hands In Bloody Clothes After Roommate's Beating Death: Police

Galina Smirnova was arrested on Tuesday and arraigned Wednesday after police were called to the Seagate Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in Coney Island around 10:30 p.m. on Sunday, according to a criminal complaint reviewed by People.

Witnesses on the scene reportedly told police they found the victim, Nina Kravtsov (above), "laying in her bed, non-responsive, covered in blood, and with gash marks about her face and head." The two had been roommates for just two days before the deadly attack as Smirnova had arrived at the facility on Friday.

Police alleged that at the same time staff discovered Kravtsov in her bed, with "a lot of blood across the room," Smirnova was found standing in the bathroom wearing a bloody hospital gown, with "blood on her legs," per the report, and "washing her hands in the bathroom sink."

The Daily News reports that Kravtsov was rushed to the hospital, where she ultimately succumbed to her injuries and died at 5:39 a.m. She never made any statements, per police, as to why she'd been attacked.

Citing police sources, NBC affilliate WNBC was told that the women had gotten into an argument that night before the alleged attack. Nursing home staff told police they checked on the room at 8:55 on Sunday and found Kravtsov asleep. An hour later, she was "covered in blood."

In their shared room, officers reported finding that Smirnova's wheelchair had the legs and foot rests removed. One of the foot pedals was lying on the ground covered in blood, per the complaint, while the other was recovered underneath a window outside the room.

"The way she died is like in a Stephen King horror movie," Randy Zelin, attorney for the victim's family, told WABC. "This doesn't happen in real life. She was asleep sometime around 9:00. And by 10:00, she was beaten to a pulp."

Kravstov's cause of death was determined to be blunt force trauma, leading to Smirnova's arrest. The judge overseeing her case did not order a requested mental health examination for the suspect, per the Brooklyn District Attorney's office, despite their request. Police and relatives said both women suffered from dementia, per The New York Daily News.

Lucy Flom, Kravstov's daughter, told the newspaper, "My mother couldn’t have argued, because she couldn’t speak. She barely spoke."

Zelin said that dementia could play two roles in the case: if the defense argues in the criminal case that Smirnova did not know what she was doing, and in a likely civil suit against Seagate itself, the argument that they should have never put a dementia patient in a brand new environment with a roommate without some supervision.

Flom told the Daily News that Smirnova "was new. [Staffers] didn't know her. They said she was supposed to be nice and spoke Russian so they thought it would be a good match. [Then] almost the first day, the very first day, when she came, this happened."

"I just think they didn’t do enough due diligence," she said of the facility. "They probably just filled a spot."

Seagate declined to respond to the Daily News about the fatal attack except to say that an "investigation was underway."

"Dementia can bring on unprovoked out of nowhere a fit of complete rage. So defensively, that's the defense," Zelin explained. "Now it'll be interesting to see how that plays in against the backdrop of apparently discarding the piece of the wheelchair, washing her hands in the bathroom. Now suddenly we begin to see maybe I do know what I was doing."

Flom told The New York Post that her mom was 5 years old when she lost her entire family in the Holocaust. She later became a nurse in Ukraine before making her way to the United States.

"She sacrificed a lot," said Flom. "She was a single mom. She had me when she was 18. She came here to give me a good education. She was a very dedicated mother."

She said that though she lives in Florida, she would regularly come and visit her mother, who had been moved to the nursing home after the death of her husband and since suffering a small stroke in 2020. She said that the nursing home let her make a final video call to her mother on Monday after the attack.

"They let me talk to her. I was at the airport still in Florida," Flom told the Daily News. "[Her face] was just completely obliterated. She couldn’t talk but they told me to still tell her the words because she may hear me still. I just told her I loved her and I will miss her forever. But she did not respond. She was still breathing, I saw."

Flom told the newspaper that she's still haunted by that final view of her mother's battered face. "It just gave me nightmares," she said. "I cannot sleep since then."

Smirnova's next scheduled court appearance is this Friday. She is being held at the Bellevue Hospital jail ward without bail.