As Sergei Babarin stopped taking his medication and plunged deeper and deeper into paranoia, his son, Alex, begged doctors to help him.
He even had nightmares about his father shooting people.On Thursday, Alex Babarin's nightmare became reality when his father shot and killed two people at the LDS Family History Library and was then killed in a gunfight with police.
Now Alex Babarin is blaming the mental health system.
"I'm very unhappy about the situation with the mental health (system). I'm 100 percent putting the responsibility on them because they are not willing to help," said Babarin.
"I'm sure if he had been a few weeks in a hospital, he would have been well."
Alex Babarin said his father had stopped taking medication for his paranoid schizophrenia because he suspected everyone, even his doctors. Salt Lake Police Lt. Mark Zelig said Babarin had stopped taking his medication in December.
Paranoid schizophrenia is an incurable illness, but it can be effectively controlled through medication. Without it, many patients are tormented by hallucinations and the sensation that everyone is against them.
According to Alex Babarin, doctors told him his father could not be involuntarily committed to a mental hospital unless he posed an imminent danger to himself or others.
Babarin thinks that legal standard is crazy.
"That was a terrible mistake. It's unreasonable liberty with people who need help. You must be more preventive because one mentally ill person can damage so many lives, not because he intends but because he can't help it," Alex Babarin said.
The 70-year-old Sergei Babarin had gradually become ill with paranoid schizophrenia over the past 12 years, his son said. The family had emigrated from St. Petersburg (then Leningrad in the former Soviet Union) in 1981 and settled in New York. A toolmaker in Russia, Sergei Babarin became a lathe operator in New York.
After a while, his father became depressed, said people didn't appreciate him, Alex Babarin said. By the time the family decided to move to Salt Lake City in 1989, Babarin was unable to work.
He and his wife, Zoya, moved into St. Mark's Tower, a subsidized apartment building for the elderly and disabled at 650 S. 300 West.
"Salt Lake City was very different from New York, so clean and pretty. He liked it here very much," his son said.
The elder Babarin developed a habit of taking long walks day and night.
He often walked to different places in downtown Salt Lake City trying to interest people in his inventions. One of them was an improved belt buckle for motor vehicles.
Several years ago, while walking at night, Babarin was assaulted and robbed three different times in close succession, his son said.
Zelig said Babarin was not known to have had any animosity toward the LDS Church -- that he had only been known to comment that it was strange that Mormons had basketball courts in their chapels.
He said Babarin had a reputation for harassing people in his apartment building and people who simply were in front of his window.
Zelig said that in May 1998, a bicyclist told police Babarin stuck an umbrella in his bicycle spokes as he rode by and accused him of being a spy. No charges were brought because the bicyclist did not want to pursue the case. Zelig said Babarin thought his own son was a CIA spy.
Neighbors and Zelig said Babarin would say things like "Heil Hitler" and "Hitler was right."
Salt Lake Police Chief Ruben Ortega said Babarin was arrested and charged with assault and carrying a concealed weapon after a 1995 fight at the ZCMI department store downtown. Zelig said Babarin had confronted a 73-year-old man in a restroom, yelled something unintelligible and tried to bite the man.
Babarin was carrying a .22-caliber Ruger then. He pleaded guilty to carrying a concealed dangerous weapon, was placed on probation and was supposed to have turned the gun in. However, it was not known whether he did or whether it was the same gun he used Thursday.
"I thought he had quite a few problems," said Adelaide Fern Payne, who lives on the same floor as the Babarins. "He used to raise his arm (in a Nazi salute) and say Heil Hitler."
But sometimes Babarin and his wife would go out to the countryside and bring back fresh fruits and vegetables. "She would knock on my door and say, 'For you, from the country, not the supermarket,' " Payne said.
Babarin's inability to speak English well aggravated his mental state.
"Some people misunderstood him and he would get angry," said Diane L'Etoile, the manager at St. Mark's Tower. "He'd frown, stomp his feet and get in the elevator.
"He seemed disturbed if he saw women sitting around the lobby. He said he didn't understand why they were there," L'Etoile said.
But on Thursday morning, hours before he killed two people and was himself killed, Babarin seemed normal to his wife. "He was talking about exercising and losing weight, and then he went out for his walk," his son said.
Then the police came to bring her the terrible news.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.