The unspeakable brutality and horrific nature of war continues in Ukraine, so far off on another side of the world that we have mostly become desensitized to the tragedy. But that can be said about so much.
No one seems certain yet of when 73-year old Albert Titov was able to get his family out of Ukraine, but it is said to have been recently. He was able to come to shores where bombs don't kill babies and soldiers don't rape children and streets don't turn red from so much blood being shed.
Titov ended up living on Galveston Island, where the elderly man enjoyed the relaxation of fishing, the gentle sounding calmness of waves lapping the shore, while dropping a line to catch something either for food or sport. In another age, Titov may have inspired Hemmingway to write a second novel about an old man and the sea, but that will never happen.
On Tuesday afternoon, January 17, at about 5:40, Albert Titov was viciously, repeatedly stabbed in the back six times by two Black men who fled in a white sedan, according to the Galveston police report. That's all they know. For the very long life that Titov lived, that is all we know.
There had been some light fog that day, the National Weather Service records. The high was 68. The sun set at 5:45 so the last of the day's rays were dancing like orange diamonds across the waves along the beachfront near Boddeker Road, we can imagine, when the 73 year man who had no doubt seen so much in his life cast off the last line before he was stabbed over and over and over and over again, presumably by people he did not know, for reasons we do not know or understand. He died in a hospital 40 minutes later, so we might presume he suffered, painfully.
Titov, we presume born in Ukraine, would have come into this life in a region ravaged by both the Soviets and the Nazi's in World War Two, though it was already a member of the United Nations by the year of his birth while his country was still controlled by the Soviet Union. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, on January 21 in 1990, 300,000 Ukrainians joined hands and formed a human chain from Kyiv to Lviv standing united for independence and we do not know if Titov was among them. Was he among the 90% of Ukrainians who voted for independence? We do not know what side he took, if any, during the Orange Revolution. The details of his whereabouts during the Russian invasion on February 22 last year are not included in the police report, but so little detail about the man is, as is almost always the case with police reports. They depersonalize victims, reducing lives to places and the exact time when their fortunes met its pitiful end.
Galveston police are asking anyone with information to call, as they generally do in police reports.
What value is there to a human life? What stories matter? Who was this murder victim and do we care? Another statistic. Another homicide. Another tragedy.
photo: Getty Images