Vladislav Bogomolny’s laugh used to fill up an entire room and rattle around the rafters. Now, it’s only a memory.
“I’ll never forget his laugh; it was so loud and obnoxious. And when he laughed, he laughed. He never tried to hold it back,” said Antonio Cacares, the founder of the Invisible Fire Movement, a hip-hop-oriented art and music organization Bogomolny frequented.
“He had a lot of vision. He always wanted to do things bigger and better. We threw one event and there weren’t enough people for him there; he wanted to fill up a whole warehouse and get 500 people there. He wasn’t here just to fool around but to actually do something. He was really cool, and I miss him now.”
Bogomolny and classmate Mikhail Nikolov, both 17, were found dead in a 67-foot ravine last week by fellow students and teachers from San Francisco’s Urban Pioneer Experiential Academy who were all part of a wilderness outing in Monterey County.
Bogomolny, known as “Robbie” to his friends, was the son of Ina and Igor Bogomolny, who emigrated from Kishined, Moldova, in the mid-1990s. The couple subsequently divorced and both have remarried. Bogomolny’s father and stepfather, Dmitry Weinstein, are both Jewish, and Weinstein confirmed Bogomolny considered himself a Jew as well.
Bogomolny’s immediate family members were too distraught to speak at this time and declined to participate in this article.
Details surrounding Bogomolny and Nikolov’s death remain murky. The boys died on the 10th day of an 11-day school trip to Los Padres National Forest that has been highly covered in the local media.
On the night of the boys’ deaths, a pair of strangers walked into the high school students’ camp site, shared liquor and brandished sword-like weapons.
According to an Urban Pioneer student contacted by the Bulletin, the strangers boasted that they were serial killers and were the reason people have gone missing in Santa Cruz.
For unknown reasons, Bogomolny and Nikolov left their base camp in the early morning hours of March 5 without their flashlights, carrying only cigarette lighters to illuminate the moonless night.
Monterey County Sheriff’s officials have said that both boys were drinking prior to their deaths, but it is unknown whether Bogomolny or Nikolov were intoxicated at the time.
Though it is unknown what part, if any, the strangers played in the incident, Sheriff’s spokesman Bill Cassara told the Monterey Herald that they could face charges if it is determined the alcohol they allegedly gave Bogomolny or Nikolov contributed to the minors’ deaths. He confirmed the strangers had “carted in hard liquor” but would not quantify how much.
Friends and classmates uniformly recalled Robbie as a fun, energetic and clever boy, who was a gifted artist.
“He’d crack jokes all day long. He was a comedian,” recalled Phillip Spiegel, a fellow student at the academy, an independent charter school in the San Francisco Unified School District.
Bogomolny is survived by his father and stepmother, Igor and Yelena Bogomolny of Daly City; mother and stepfather Ina Bogomolny and Dmitry Weinstein and 5-year-old half-brother Samuel — who he named — of San Francisco.