Ukrainian Father Who Leanred His Wife & Children Were Killed Through Twitter Photo Speaks Out
A father of two in Ukraine says he found out his wife and children were killed by seeing their photo on Twitter. Now the man is speaking out to CNN about the experience.
As he was looking through Twitter, Serhiy Perebyinis expressed to reporters that he caught a post reporting the death of a family in a mortar attack by Russian troops as they were striving to evacuate from Irpin. Not long after, photos surfaced on his feed of four people lying on the ground.
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“I recognized the luggage, and that is how I knew,” Perebyinis told the New York Times. The photographer captured the shocking images which quickly began to spread online.
During the emotional interview with CNN, Perebyinis expressed how hard it hit him once he noticed the pictures on the Internet. He detailed the last time he talked to his wife was the day when there was “already no water, electricity, [and] gas.”
He shared that he was not with his family when The Times reported, because he was in Eastern Ukraine taking care of his sick mother.
“At the last moment, however, the convoy she was planning to travel with was shelled and fired at,” Perebyinis told Burnett. “Then she came on foot to the bridge trying to make an escape on foot.”
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Perebyinis explained that he and his use a app to track each others whereabouts, but the morning his wife and children tries to leave he “noticed that there was an unusual geolocation between Kyiv and Irpin.”
“Then 20 minutes later, her phone moved to another location, to a hospital in Kyiv,” he continued. “I suspected something was wrong, and I asked friends to come to the hospital and find out whether there was any bad news.”
Then that’s when he went on Twitter and saw the shocking images. “I recognized my children. I recognized their things and their clothes,” he said. “I called my friends to say, ‘The children are dead. Their bodies are lying on the pavement.’ And I asked them, ‘Please, could you help me to find my wife?’”