Sophie Sonnenfeld, Contributing Photographer

When the Yale Police Department told Victoria Sovetova she had to prepare funeral arrangements for her son in June, she had almost no information regarding his disappearance.

Sovetova had no access to police reports, no declared cause of death and thus not even a death certificate. No one could give a clear explanation for where her son, Anton Sovetov ART ’16, had been between February, when he was last seen in New Haven, and May, when his body was found washed up across the Long Island Sound in Suffolk County.  

Anton Sovetov’s autopsy report is due within the month. It will be the Yale Police Department’s last glimmer of hope in an exhaustive investigation that has so far led only to dead ends. 

Police have refused to publicly release footage, reports or documents, citing the ongoing investigation. In any case, Sovetova has grown increasingly frustrated.

“It is like a real mystery case where the information has kind of been hidden,” Sovetova told the News through a translator over a phone interview in June. Sovetov was from St. Petersburg and Sovetova still lives in Russia. “We have the suspicion that so many facts are hidden and were not shared.” 

Ahead of the autopsy’s release, an investigation by the News has found inconsistencies in YPD’s handling of the case as well as details Sovetova claims were released to her by the medical examiner’s office. 

Who was Anton Sovetov?

Sovetov first entered headlines on Feb. 17, when the YPD appealed for public help in a missing persons case, two weeks after Sovetov had been last heard from.

Sovetov came to New Haven in 2014 as a graphic design student at the Yale School of Art and was hired by Yale’s Office of Public Affairs and Communications as a graphic designer in 2017. Sovetov lived in an apartment on Chapel Street just steps from Yale’s Old Campus and was last seen on footage heading back there after shopping at the Elm City Market down the street. 

Investigators remain stumped by what happened once Sovetov returned to his apartment — and how he ended up on the other side of the Long Island Sound. The circumstances under which Sovetov might have left or been taken from his apartment are unclear, especially when YPD and photos obtained by the News confirm that his winter coat, his phone, passport and wallet were all found inside his apartment. 

Still, YPD found no signs of foul play inside the apartment. YPD Sergeant Leopoldo Otero said YPD officers documented every item in the apartment. 

​​“It actually looked very clean and normal,” Otero, who has been investigating the case, told the News. “It was very meticulously kept, so it would be easy for us to know whether something was out of order.”  

By tracking phone use and financial records, police developed a timeframe of a week after Feb. 5 during which they say Sovetov disappeared. Police said they found no evidence that Sovetov had ordered an Uber or other car rides on his phone. Similarly, they found no evidence that he had boarded trains, planes or any other public transportation prior to his disappearance. 

“We did a lot of work inside the apartment,” Otero said.

Because the YPD initially opened the missing person case in February when colleagues reported him absent from work, the YPD still holds jurisdiction over the missing person case. Otero said that the YPD has invested thousands of hours into the case. 

According to Otero, the YPD has sought assistance from multiple avenues, including investigators from New Haven Police Department’s missing person detective unit. YPD officers have also been collaborating with state and federal law enforcement partners throughout the case to go over the evidence and try to plot out scenarios. 

Suffolk County police, meanwhile, are handling the found body aspect of Sovetov’s case because that was where he washed up and because it remains unclear where he died. 

“This was an exhaustive case,” Yale Police Chief Anthony Campbell said. “Every resource possible was thrown at it. Every possible angle, from ‘Did he want to go missing on his own?’ to ‘Was he abducted?’ ‘Was he a spy? ‘Was he a threat to the state?’ We’ve come at it from every possible angle — you name it, we’ve come at it.”

Where’s the footage?

After spending months thoroughly searching the apartment and bringing police dogs to search outside the apartment along the corner of Chapel Street and College Street in April, Otero said that no leads turned up. According to Campbell, Sovetov’s apartment uses a key card but does not track swipes into the building and does not have security cameras. 

Campbell and Otero also confirmed they had pulled any footage YPD could snag within a five-block radius around the time during the week that Sovetov supposedly went missing. Within the five-block radius there are various gaps in camera coverage, Campbell said. 

If Sovetov had even gotten into a car outside his apartment building, Campbell said it would not have been covered by camera footage. 

The challenge with collecting this footage, they explained, was that many cameras in the area were on but not necessarily recording or keeping footage, while other cameras were broken.

Police followed camera footage of any person frame by frame, camera to camera, that could have been Sovetov. They attempted to verify each figure was not Sovetov but a few figures escaped, traveling further down routes where no camera footage existed. 

When approached by the News for footage or information in March, several managers and employees at businesses along Chapel Street told the News that they had not been aware of Sovetov’s disappearance, and that they were not approached by any police for information. 

Even the existing footage of Sovetov inside Elm City Market has never been shared by police, though Ronnell Higgins, associate vice president of public safety and community engagement, confirmed the footage as accurate. Instead, the footage emerged on a New Haven crime tracking platform called On Scene Media on February 18. The footage not only provided the public with a look at what Sovetov had last been wearing and where he had been, but in fact contradicted the timeline YPD had released to the public.

The YPD had sent out alerts that Sovetov had last been seen in the downtown area on Feb. 4, although the footage shows Sovetov buying groceries on Feb. 5. A week after that footage emerged, some news outlets were still posting a statement from Yale’s public information office reporting that Sovetov disappeared “approximately” around Feb. 4.

“We don’t like to share footage, especially that early,” Otero told the News, explaining why YPD did not circulate that footage. “When [On Scene Media] shared it, it was well before we were ready to.” 

Otherwise, Otero said, sharing such footage could have been an invasion of privacy. 

“We can’t invade everyone’s privacy just because someone else says they’re missing although we did our due diligence in investigating to put it out there as early as we could,” he said. 

In the case of Annie Le, a Yale graduate student who was found murdered at Yale in 2009, YPD posted footage and a $10,000 reward for information on her whereabouts only three days after she had been reported missing. 

Police offered a $10,000 reward to anyone who could provide information leading to Sovetov’s whereabouts. That offer came in April, nearly two months after he went missing. 

When a Cutchogue, NY resident identified as Amy Kaufman by the Suffolk Times was walking her dog along the beach in May, she and her 4-year-old son stumbled upon Sovetov’s body. She told the Suffolk Times that the body had been fully clothed, found about a mile west of Cutchogue’s Duck Pond Road. 

“My son looked out and said, ‘Is that a dead body?’” Ms. Kaufman told the Suffolk Times in an article posted May 6. “It was very recognizable as that and so I said, ‘Yeah I think it is.’”

Yale police told the News that Kaufman later claimed the $10,000 reward. 

“A matter of Anton’s privacy”

When asked why police had not released footage of Sovetov prior to his disappearance, Campbell made reference to an unspecified privacy concern that dissuaded YPD from sharing the footage publicly.  

“This is where information that we have about the case doesn’t always make sense to people who don’t have that information,” Campbell told the News. “If you had the information that we have about his personal life, his medical life, information that his mother wouldn’t have, you would understand why we did not put it out right away.” 

“It’s a matter of Anton’s privacy as we started looking into his life and coming to realize certain things, he’s a grown man, he has the right to live the way he wants to live,” Campbell continued. 

Because of what Campbell called the “unique nature” of Sovetov’s case, he said he is not sure if all the details will ever “truly come out.” He said again that this is because it would present a privacy issue. 

Furthermore, without the autopsy back yet, Otero added that the YPD did not want to share extraneous and potentially damaging information that might not be relevant to the case.  

Otero did share that police searched his computer but did not expand on what they found, again citing privacy issues. 

“We found a lot of stuff on his computer, but there was nothing that we can elaborate on now,” Ontario said. 

Former Branford Police Chief John DeCarlo explained to the News that police departments typically consider privacy issues before releasing information in missing person cases. 

“Finding missing people has become easier than it had been in the past but it depends on whether the police department feels that something has been done to cause the person that is missing to be in danger in some way,” he told the News in April. “Or the person wanted to disappear, which is sometimes the case usually that is determined by medical records, by past behavior and things like that.”

DeCarlo explained to the News that police will typically release silver alerts when the person reported missing is a juvenile, elderly, or has a potentially life-threatening medical condition. Police released a silver alert for Sovetov on Saturday, Feb. 19. 

Otero said the YPD released that silver alert when they found out Sovetov did have a potentially life-threatening medical condition. 

Police declined to share what that medical condition was. 

“A real mystery case”

The lack of details has left Victoria Sovetova with questions. 

“She’s his mother, but from a criminal investigative side, you don’t share certain things even with family members, mothers, spouses,” YPD Chief Anthony Campbell told the News on Tuesday morning. “So I understand her frustration. She kind of wants everything, but we can’t give her everything because it is an open and active investigation. So we give her what we can.”

Despite a massive hacking attack that rattled the medical examiner’s office and the entire county’s local government in September, police estimated that the Suffolk County Medical Examiner’s Office will finalize its autopsy report within a month. 

Through a translator, Sovetova wrote to the YPD four times after the disappearance requesting basic information including the date the investigation commenced, confirmation of identity, facts and circumstances around his disappearance and any existing video footage from cameras. Each time, she said she received similarly sparse responses, with officers reminding her that this was an active investigation. 

In a June 17 letter, Brian Donnelly, the YPD Lieutenant in command of the investigative services unit, told Sovetova that the Office of the Medical Examiner in Suffolk County had completed all testing relative to Sovetov. He added that once that report was finalized, the medical examiner’s office would share information with the YPD. 

Though Sovetova had received no official documentation or reports of her son’s death, in the June 17 letter, Donnelly wrote that “the Office of the Medical Examiner has advised final funeral arrangements for Anton can now be made.” Donnelly then informed Sovetova in the letter that University representatives would contact Sovetova with “appropriate next steps.” 

Otero told the News that once the medical examiner gathers all evidence required for an autopsy from the body, they send out what they have extracted for tests. 

“They can’t just keep all the bodies because then the medical examiner’s office would be full,” Otero explained. “Typically when an autopsy is completed, the body is released back to the family. This situation is kind of difficult because the family is not here.”

Sovetova in June told the News she was hesitant to cremate her son’s body without any actual proof that this was his body. At the very least, she said, wanted a positive identification. 

That sort of identification in a case where the body has been in the water for so long typically comes through matching dental records. The record matching is not conducted by police but rather by the medical examiner’s office. A board of certified dentists then compares those records to the dental records of the body to verify the body is in fact the person. 

Campbell said Sovetov had a dentist in New Haven who sent records to the medical examiner’s office, but declined to reveal who that dentist was. 

Campbell said the YPD never handled those positive identification records. Instead, the YPD facilitates communication and requests the dental record matching from the medical examiner’s office. “We don’t have those, they go straight there,” he said. 

Otero said he believes that as of October, the medical examiner had verified to Sovetova that the body was Sovetov. Sovetova could not be reached at the time of publication to confirm if she had seen any positive identification records. 

In terms of communication, records and evidence for the case, Otero said “it was almost like a perfect storm” of barriers. Some of the communication issues between Sovetova and YPD, both Otero and Sovetova noted, stemmed in part from the ongoing Russian-Ukraine War. 

The News has not been able to confirm the status or current location of Sovetov’s remains.

Mixed messages from the medical examiner

Sovetova’s confusion is further complicated by details she said she received from the medical examiner’s office.

Sovetova said that she had been in contact with a representative of the Suffolk County Medical Examiner’s Office in June. According to Sovetova, the representative had told her that the office’s working theory was that Sovetov had been addicted to drugs for the past two years, and that he had voluntarily walked into the water from New Haven after going missing in February. 

The News could not confirm any record of this conversation. The medical examiner’s office has not responded to multiple requests for comment and rejected the News’ request for more information in July under the Freedom of Information Act. The office also did not respond to questions about Sovetova’s allegation that details of the case had been leaked to her in this manner.

The Suffolk County medical examiner’s office was hacked, along with the rest of the county, in a ransomware attack in early Sept.

The criminal cyber hacking group “BlackCat” has claimed responsibility for the hack and is demanding money in exchange for records they now possess. According to a CBS New York news report in late September, the county has backups of all the records. 

Campbell and Otero both declined to comment on Sovetova’s account, although Campbell has said that the privacy issue they had mentioned as potentially relevant to the case was not directly related to drug use. 

The University conducts drug testing of employees according to staff workplace policies.

Sovetova said that in her last communication with Sovetov on Feb. 1, he did not show signs of illness or distress. A few days before he went missing, he had even fully paid for a vacation with friends planned for August. 

“Nobody can confirm that he was taking drugs or that his behavior was kind of strange. Nobody said that,” Sovetova told the News. “He doesn’t even have that personality that you might say, ‘okay, maybe,’ not at all. And this gives us the additional feeling that the police are covering something, they are protecting the case and they are distributing false information.” 

Campbell declined to comment on Sovetova’s concern. 

What now?

The University hosted a memorial service to honor Sovetov’s life in late June. Friends, colleagues and former classmates admired his art and impact on the Yale community. 

According to Sovetova, some of Sovetov’s friends have sorted through his belongings in the apartment which is now empty. Some belongings were given to those friends, and others were donated to charity, thrown away or returned to Sovetova. 

Sovetova said that she hopes to publish the original version of Sovetov’s Yale School of Art dissertation in his hometown. 

While they wait for the autopsy, police are encouraging the public to step forward with information. 

“We are always open to any information that anyone in the public may have regarding Anton or regarding this case,” Campbell said. “But other than that, we’re looking for the autopsy and just trying to wrap things up.” 

At the time of publication, the News has been unable to verify if Sovetov’s body has been cremated and what, if any, documents have been released to Sovetov’s mother. 

“She does not have many details,” the translator said on Sovetova’s behalf in June. “She does not have any explanation, just quick confirmations and she has a feeling that now they want to close the case.”

Police ask that with information contact the YPD at (203) 432-4406, the NHPD at (203) 946-6316 or use the Yale University LiveSafe app.