GRIEIVING: Gerard Honig yesterday shows the diamond-heart necklace he had intended to give Yelena Bulchenko (above).
GRIEIVING: Gerard Honig yesterday shows the diamond-heart necklace he had intended to give Yelena Bulchenko. (NY Post: William Lopez)
Two dozen long-stemmed red roses from her boyfriend were delivered to her office just in time for Valentine’s Day — but Yelena Bulchenko wasn’t there to receive them.
The tragic 20-year-old woman had been stabbed to death by a crazed stalker three days earlier.
“I had [the roses] sent to her of fice,” Bulchenko’s grieving boy friend, Gerard Honig, told The Post yesterday, his voice choked with emotion. And “we were going out to dinner” at the Korean barbecue eatery Woo Lae Oak on Mercer Street in SoHo, he said. “She’d never been there but always wanted to go. I was going to give her the present I got her, a diamond- heart necklace.
“Now I’ll be alone for Valentine’s Day,” Honig said, breaking into quiet sobs. “I’ll see my family and my friends, but I won’t have her.”
Bulchenko’s shattered co-workers couldn’t bring themselves to open the box of flowers after they were delivered to the Bright Smiles Dental office on West Fifth Street in Brooklyn.
UPS driver Carmelo Russo had pulled up to the office about
1 p.m. and handed the long cardboard box to a woman inside.
“Don’t you know, don’t you watch TV? These are for the girl who was killed,” one of Bulchenko’s co-workers, Jane Malchenko, told Russo.
“No, no, no!” the stunned Russo said, making the sign of the cross.
Bulchenko’s coworkers said they would bring the flowers to today’s funeral for her and her mother, who also was killed in the weekend rampage that left four dead.
A terrified Bulchenko, 20, had first dialed 911 Friday afternoon — seconds after discovering her mother’s bloodied body in their Brooklyn home.
“There’s blood all over the place!” she shouted to the emergency operator, a source told The Post.
Minutes later, Bulchenko herself was dead, also fatally stabbed by alleged murderous madman Maksim Gelman, 23, an obsessed but spurned suitor, authorities say.
Gelman was arrested the next morning, after a 28-hour killing spree that included the murders of his stepdad and a random pedestrian.
Gelman’s attack on his mother’s hulking boyfriend, Alexsandr Kuznetsov, 54, his first victim, was particularly brutal, a source told The Post.
“He put up a big fight — both his hands were badly cut,” the source said. “He had 30 to 40 stab wounds. They were all over his body.”
A police source also revealed that while on the lam, Gelman hid out part of the time in a Nissan Maxima he’d carjacked about 1 a.m. Saturday in Brooklyn and then parked behind a residence at 76-41 76th St. in a quiet Queens neighborhood.
Queens homeowner Bob Treadwell told The Post that Gelman drove behind a neighbor’s home at about 2 a.m. The neighbor asked Gelman to move, and the suspect pulled behind Treadwell’s home.
“I went out in the morning to empty the garbage, and the car was still blocking the driveway,” Treadwell said. “He was gone, but there was blood and food in the car, and the driver’s seat was fully reclined.”
A grand jury is expected to hear from Gelman’s mother, Svetlana, in the case today.
NYPD Officer Terrance Howell, one of the heroic cops who helped bust him, said yesterday that he was just doing his job, though he did admit: “My family’s very proud of me.”
Additional reporting by Joe Walker, William Gorta, Reuven Blau, Amber Sutherland, Perry Chiaramonte, Ikimulisa Livingston and Reuven Fenton