Sergei Babarin | Murderpedia, the encyclopedia of murderers

For the second time in three months, this conservative city grappled today with news that a schizophrenic resident who refused to take medication had walked up to strangers and shot them dead.

Police spokesmen and advocates for the mentally ill called for barring gun sales to people with histories of severe mental illness and for laws mandating that schizophrenics take their medicine.

The gunman, Sergei Babarin, 70, killed two people and wounded five others at a genealogical library before dying in a gun battle with the police on Thursday, the authorities said. His widow and son said today that he had refused to take his medication for schizophrenia since December.

Only three months ago, on Jan. 13, De-Kieu Duy, a woman who also had a history of schizophrenia, entered an office complex three blocks away from Thursday's killings at Temple Square, the heart of the Mormon Church, and shot to death an AT&T employee, the police say.

The killings are only the latest involving schizophrenics who refuse to take their medicine. These cases, the police say, include a man who pushed a young woman in front of a subway train in New York in January, a man who stabbed to death his pregnant fiancee last June at their home in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., and a Montana man who killed two police officers at the United States Capitol last summer.

The Treatment Advocacy Center, which seeks mandatory medication laws, says Americans with untreated severe mental illnesses commit nearly 1,000 homicides a year.

''People who are having severe mental illness problems should be prevented from buying a weapon,'' Lieut. Phil Kirk, a police spokesman here, said, noting that Mr. Barbarin and Ms. Duy had previously been arrested for misdemeanor offenses involving weapons. Referring to a Federal law requiring background checks for felonies before guns may be sold, he said, ''The Brady bill should be extended to misdemeanors involving weapons offenses.''

In 1995, Mr. Babarin was arrested here after he punched a 73-year-old man in a department store restroom, then tried to bite him on the face, the police said. At the time, he was carrying a loaded .22-caliber semiautomatic pistol. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of carrying a concealed weapon, and the police carried out a court order to destroy his gun. Today, Lieutenant Kirk said the police were trying to learn how Mr. Barbarin got a new weapon.

With surveys indicating that two-thirds of Utah adults own firearms, mental health advocates say more money should be spent on insuring that schizophrenics take their medicine, prescription drugs that often allow them to lead normal lives.

''All I am hearing today is how we need to keep guns away from the mentally ill,'' said Vickie Cottrell, executive director of the Utah chapter of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, a nonprofit advocacy group. ''Well, how about getting the medication to the mentally ill?''

In Utah, medication is only mandatory if mentally ill people pose an immediate danger to themselves or to others. Mrs. Cottrell, whose daughter has brought her schizophrenia under control with medication, said: ''I know of too many families who have tried to get their loved one in a hospital. Too many times, terrible things happen.''

Only last month, the Utah Legislature rejected pleas by mental health advocates to finance a system that would provide medical monitoring of severely mentally ill people who are released from hospitals and prisons.

Mr. Barbarin's son, Alex, said he had asked doctors for help with his father, but was told that state laws limited involuntary commitment to people who posed an imminent danger.

''It's an unreasonable liberty with people who need help,'' he told The Deseret News here. ''You must be more preventive, because one mentally ill person can damage so many lives -- not because he intends to, but because he can't help it.''

Sergei Babarin, a toolmaker who emigrated from Leningrad, Russia, to New York in 1981, had displayed odd behavior after moving here a decade ago, the police said.

Mark Zelig of the Salt Lake Police said Mr. Babarin had thought his son was a spy for the Central Intelligence Agency and last year attacked a bicyclist by sticking an umbrella in his wheel spokes. Mr. Barbarin was not charged in that incident.

''He would say 'Heil Hitler and I hate America,' '' a neighbor said on Thursday at the the apartment complex for the elderly where he lived. ''He could've been helped mentally, but somebody failed.''