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10 июля 2003 года.
Player's Death Stuns Gernander - Hartford Courant 

By BRUCE BERLET

Wolf Pack captain Ken Gernander finds it unfathomable that teammate Roman Lyashenko committed suicide last weekend.

"It's shocking because it's so uncharacteristic," Gernander said Wednesday from his home in Warba, Minn. "Some guys wear their heart on their sleeve and are up and down a lot. But Roman seemed to take everything with a grain of salt.

"He had a very, very dry sense of humor, which I appreciated, but emotionally he was always the same, never on that emotional roller coaster. But maybe we didn't know him as well as we thought we did. Still, it's so out of character for the Roman I knew."

Lyashenko, 24, was found dead Sunday in his hotel bathroom at a beach resort in Antalya, a southern Mediterranean province in Turkey. Lyashenko, who was vacationing with his mother and sister, wrote a suicide note, then apparently tried to cut his wrists before hanging himself, a Turkish police officer said Wednesday.

In the note, Lyashenko apologized for killing himself, according to the paramilitary police officer in Istanbul who spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity. The prosecutor's office refused to comment, saying the investigation was ongoing.

Wolf Pack director of public relations Kevin Kavanagh said Rangers officials "are waiting for a more appropriate time before making further comment."

Lyashenko was the Wolf Pack's fourth-leading scorer (23 goals, 35 assists in 71 games) last season and second in plus/minus (plus-25).

The Rangers tendered Lyashenko a qualifying offer by the June 30 deadline, but he reportedly was going to return to Russia if he did not receive a one-way contract in which players receive the same salary whether they are in the NHL or AHL.

Besides having a low-key demeanor, Lyashenko's death is considered suspicious because Alexei Traseukh, who coached Lyashenko for Lokomotiv Yaroslavl in Russia, was shot to death in January in his apartment in Yaroslavl, where Lyashenko lived. In May, Igor Grigorenko, a former teammate in international competition, sustained a broken leg and concussion in a car crash in Russia. In June, former Lokomotiv teammate Vladimir Antipov was injured and his wife killed in a car crash.

Lyashenko's apparent suicide fueled speculation of links to the Russian Mafia.

"I wouldn't even want to speculate on that," Gernander said. "All I know is I appreciated Roman as a person and respected him as a player. He was sly like a fox, spoke better [English] than he let on and was quite quizzical. Not much went past him. If there was something he didn't understand, like a joke, he'd find you afterwards and ask about it because he wanted to know what it meant.

"My dad [a Dallas scout] loved Roman as a player, and he was the best two-way player we had. But it's hard to talk about that now because it's all so irrelevant."

An Associated Press report is included in this story.

Страничка Романа Ляшенко на сайте "Звёзды с Востока"

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