DEAD INNOCENT: NON-ACTIVIST IN WRONG PLACE AT WRONG TIME ON MARCH 1

At seven o’clock in the evening Grigor called his wife, Varduhi, and told her to warm up the dinner since he was coming home and was very hungry. “I said, Grigor, my darling, I have cooked your favorite dinner, with lentil, I’m putting it on the stove right now,” Grigor’s wife, 27-year-old Varduhi, says.
But Grigor never ate his favorite lentil dinner on March 1.
Grigor Gevorgyan, 28, the only breadwinner for his six-member family, went out of his half-damp and poor one-room home in Yerevan’s Kond district after 5 pm and the next day his wife and two little sons received his dead body, with a bullet wound on his forehead.
“He worked at a gas station, they called and told him to come to get his wages. We were watching TV. Grigor said people were holding a peaceful protest, I’ll go and fetch my money. What would happen?”
Varduhi remembers how she ironed his clothes, made coffee for him, how Grigor hugged, eight-year-old Hovhannes and four-year-old Rubik, kissed them good-bye and told her: “I’ll go quickly and come back, at least I’ll have some money today.”
With rumpled hair and an uncared-for face, Varduhi, who grew stronger from her sorrow, remembers what was happening on that day. She was receiving information from Grigor, who, because of absence of public transport, went up on foot from his workplace near Hayrenik Cinema to the Circus, then found himself in a blocked area.
“At 8 pm Grigor phoned, he was in Leo Street. He said it was an ugly situation. He’d found himself in a blocked area, police did not let him get out, pointing a gun at him, they were telling him to back off, or else they would kill him,” Varduhi says. “I began to shout, telling him I was going to him. He said, no, don’t leave home. At about 9 pm he no longer answered phone calls. Then his mobile was switched off altogether and we didn’t have any news.”
Several hours later, Grigor’s relatives began to search for him in all possible places.
“We learned in the corridor of the mortuary that Grigor had gone. They said he was shot by a sniper. His brain was exploded,” says Varduhi, wringing her hands.
“Acute disorder of vitally important functions of the brain, a bullet wound of the skull,” the death certificate states the cause of Grigor Gevorgyan’s death.
“If I knew that my husband was active, struggled, became a victim for his ideas, my heart would be in rest. He did not even go to the polls. I was telling him to go and vote for whoever he wanted, but go, but he was saying he didn’t care.”
Varduhi remembers that when before her husband left they received information people were taking out cobblestones in order to defend, Grigor was showing his astonishment.
“He was saying: Varduhi, aren’t they afraid?...” Varduhi remembers. “And I was saying, people were struggling. What should they be afraid of?”
Varduhi says that perhaps it was Grigor’s difficult childhood that he was so cautious.
“In the 90s his father perished in Karabakh, he was a freedom-fighter. Other fighters had also come to Grigor’s funeral and they, too, said that it was a sniper’s shot. They had been war fighters for so many years,” the young widow says.
The walls of the room are black from their stove. Gevorgyan’s relatives also live upstairs. Grigor’s mother died about a year ago. Now instead of his mother’s mourning photograph they hang Grigor’s.
“This home is cursed,” Varduhi’s mother, Gayane, says putting her arms upwards. She also lives with Grigor’s family. “The children had a thousand dreams, which were all scuttled in a minute. Four dead people were taken from this yard within a year. We don’t know where to go, what answer to give to these children.”
Marianna Grigoryan

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