George T., VNN's largest financial contributor, alerted me to this Tacoma, WA crime. I googled up the following news report: (Another news report says: "Police Silent on Details", meaning of course the cops decided it's a hush crime)

Tears for the girl in red flip-flops

By ROBERT L. JAMIESON Jr.
P-I COLUMNIST
She lives the immigrant credo of hard work.

In the dark wee hours, while the city sleeps, Daniella Kondratyuk prepares sandwiches and desserts at a catering job near the Space Needle.
Each night she layers cheese slices atop bread and cuts fruit into jagged geometric beauty.

The drill rarely changes -- except for on Friday around 2 in the morning, when the 27-year-old immigrant from Eastern Europe toiled with a sunken heart.

"My sister called and told me a few hours ago," she said softly as a cleaning crew waxed floors nearby. "Zina is dead."

To most of us, Zina Linnik is the 12-year-old girl with the sweet face and soft doe eyes on TV screens and kidnapping posters. She became the subject of a frenzied search after she was snatched from behind her family's home in Tacoma on Independence Day.

To Kondratyuk, whose family -- like Zina's -- came to America from Ukraine, the discovery of the girl's body Thursday in a rural area was like having one of her own just taken and tossed away.

Kondratyuk lives near the Tacoma neighborhood where Zina lived and played. Her uncle went to the same English language classes as Zina's father. She goes to the same Tacoma church -- the Slavic Christian Center -- that Zina's family attended.

Theirs is a burgeoning community of immigrants from Eastern Europe. They are bound, beyond ties to the old country, in a daily struggle to inch ahead. But the abiding faith they share in their adopted homeland -- and in God -- couldn't prepare them for the underside of their dream.
Zina's dead.

"We're in shock. The whole community is," Kondratyuk said, cradling bread. "I want to cry. We're not used to this happening to us."
No one is.

The man being held as a suspect, Terapon Adhahn, came to the United States also as an immigrant from a faraway place -- Asia. If the 42-year-old legal permanent resident is charged and convicted in Zina's death, his act would stand as the ultimate betrayal of the unspoken immigrant code: You work hard, you get ahead, you contribute.

According to federal authorities, Adhahn was convicted in 1990 for incest -- an act they described to me as "moral turpitude." In 1992, he was convicted in Tacoma Municipal Court for intimidation with a deadly weapon. That conviction could have triggered a deportation process -- but federal authorities say they weren't told about it until this week.

Now, Tacoma police and the FBI are wondering if Adhahn, who says he was raped by an older sibling as a youth, had a hand in cold cases where other young girls in our region turned up dead.

For Zina, the killer pounced with predatory swiftness.
She was just 4 feet 10 and 80 pounds with red flip-flops. The last memory her father has of her will haunt him -- a gray van with his screaming daughter inside, speeding away.

Zina's parents and siblings prayed for her safe return. Now, they hope some divine balm can offer solace and understanding.

"Some people are just hurt in the mind," said Andrei Ivantsov, an assistant pastor at the Slavic Christian Center. "A child? There's no forgiveness for that in my understanding."

The congregation has 1,800 members from countries that include Russia, Ukraine, Moldova and Romania. The Linnik family has attended the church in the past but are not members.

"That they are not members means nothing to us. They are like one with us," Ivantsov said. "They are such a nice family, a strong family. They have eight good kids."
He caught himself: "Seven kids now."

Back in Seattle, as dawn approached Friday, Kondratyuk sighed deeply and completed her shift.

"Just an innocent kid," she said, shaking her head. "This will be a very big funeral for us. Everyone will be there."

She braced for the drive south on Interstate 5, back to her Tacoma home, back to where people from the homeland, full of anger and hurt and tears, will bury the little girl who died too soon.

P-I columnist Robert L. Jamieson Jr. can be reached at 206-448-8125 or robertjamieson@seattlepi.com.
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