A beautiful blond nurse and her mom were discovered brutally stabbed to death in a blood-spattered Brooklyn apartment were remembered this morning as “amazing human beings” who “loved life.”
The horrific murders of Mount Sinai Hospital maternity-ward nurse Larisa Prikhodko, 28, and her mother, Tatyana Prikhodko, 56, also a registered nurse, in the mom’s Sheepshead Bay apartment over the weekend sparked an international manhunt for Tatyana’s longtime live-in beau, Nikolai Rakossi.
While Rakossi, a 52-year-old day laborer, escaped and is now believed to be hiding in Russia, some 250 people packed into the Nevsky Memorial Chapel in Midwood to mourn the deaths.
Larisa’s sister, Svetlana Shifrina, delivered a stirring eulogy, saying, “I never thought I’d have to do it this way. They’re beautiful beautiful people, amazing human beings and they loved life so much.”
Shifrina said her mother and sister “loved their families, their friends, their work. They loved to live. And they still do, it’s just they live differently now.”
“They’re still alive in my heart,” Shifrina added, as she burst into tears.
Twenty wreaths were placed on the stage where the two closed coffins were placed. On top of each coffin was a framed photograph of Larisa Prikhodko and her mother Tatyana.
As mourners wept, Shifrina said, “My sister was funny. She was really, really funny. People who know her, they know she has the most incredible sense of humor. … She always wanted to make us happy — make us proud of everything she’s done.”
She also said that Larisa followed “my mom’s footsteps to become a nurse. And she wanted to continue her education.”
Larisa, who lived in an apartment three floors below her mom, had been scheduled to work Saturday night at Mount Sinai but never showed. She was last seen by a friend Saturday at about 3:30 p.m.
Before Larisa was headed to work, she had left her 2 1/2-year-old son, Ryan, with his dad, Felix Zeltser, who lives nearby, friends and police said.
Cops first went to Larisa’s third-floor apartment, gaining entry through a fire-escape window. Finding her cellphone and ID undisturbed and nothing else amiss, they left, sources said.
But after learning that Larisa’s mom also had missed her scheduled shift at Brookdale Hospital, cops forced their way into Tatyana’s two-bedroom apartment.
In the entryway, they found Larisa, dressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt, dead from numerous stab wounds to her torso. A bloody knife was found near her corpse.
In the rear bedroom, police found Tatyana fully clothed, with her throat slashed and stab wounds to her face and torso. Another bloody knife was found in the dining room.
