Maksim Gelman - "I thought to myself I may as well take down a few rats that had wronged me."

 

Maksim immigrated from Ukraine with his mother in 1995, and had a step-father but was a lonely child. He was shy and lacked confidence and made no friends. He witnessed his father be very violent to his mother and then eventually saw his father turn that violence towards him. His unpopularity left him without many friends or girlfriends, which reportedly amplified his paranoia and anxiety. He often was in trouble, building a list of offences with law enforcement, which were usually graffiti based or low-level drug dealings in cocaine, prescription pills and PCP (angel dust.)  

 His first sexual encounter gave him a serious STD giving Maksim an inclination even at this point that he would not live a normal life.

 On February 11th 2011 Maxim Gelman flipped out in his kitchen and stabbed his stepfather fifty times over a quarrel he was having with his mother over a vehicle. He used a kitchen knife until this broke, and then he carried on stabbing him with a carving fork. He exited the kitchen, leaving his mother unharmed and took the vehicle anyway, he drove so irrationally that he ran over a crossing guard and broke her leg. Maksim said at this point he knew he was done for, and going to get caught so he decided to get revenge. 

 He had been enamoured by a girl called Elaina of whom he had courted for some time but she had chosen someone else over him, this rejection hit him hard and he obsessively compulsively tried to stay in her life. After killing his stepfather he drove to Elaina's mother's house and tortured her until she told him of Elaina's whereabouts, she gave in and he violently stabbed her to death in her kitchen. He decided to wait the two hours until Elaina came home.

 Elaina seeing her mother dead called 911, Gelman began to approach Elaina who was at this point pacing outside of her house on the phone. When she saw him she screamed out at him, so he hid the knife up his jacket sleeve, as he approached her she started to run from him. Outrunning her with ease he stabbed her eleven times before fleeing the scene in his car. 

 Whilst speeding away from the murder scene he crashed into another vehicle, he was so angry he left his car and stabbed the driver three times before carjacking the victim's vehicle. In this car, he ran over a sixty-two-year-old pedestrian who died of his injuries in hospital later. 

Not wanting to get hot on one car he abandoned it a few hours later hiring a taxi instead and stabbing the driver so he could take over the wheel. After a while he approached a car with a couple inside, he got out and attacked the driver stabbing him several times in the hand and taking their car. Reaching the train station he attacked a ticket seller (Lozito) stabbing him as well, but by now the authorities had released his photo and story in the papers and the general public had begun to recognise him.

 He found a motorman's cab and banged on the door demanding to be let inside and claiming to be a police officer when the motorman refused he lunged again at Lozito stabbing him in the head and face, but with great courage, Lozito fought back this time and managed to disarm him and get him on the ground. The NYPD then took over from him and took the ticket seller to the hospital. 

Lozito, later on, tried to sue the police officers for not intervening any sooner, but they counter claimed that they assumed Gelman had a gun, despite the fact that no reports of the incidents that day even mentioned Gelman carrying a gun.