Opening arguments began Tuesday in the case of a Queens air-conditioning-company owner accused of trying to poison a family — who complained for years about the AC he installed in their home — by putting mercury in their new unit.
Yuriy Kruk, the owner of A+ HVAC and Kitchen Corporation, had installed ACs in the Jamaica Estates home of Roman Pinkhasov in 2007.
But the home’s second-floor unit gave the family continuous problems, and in 2015, Kruk, 48, finally decided to install a new one to replace it.
Prosecutor Gregory Pavlides told presiding Judge Richard Buchter at the bench trial that Kruk had worked on the replacement unit and in the vents on July 24, 2015, while his workers were out of the room and while Pinkhasov’s wife, Olga, was in and out getting Kruk cleaning supplies.
When Kruk was finishing up, “Olga says, ‘Can I turn the AC back on?’ [Kruk] says, ‘Sure, but after I leave the house,’” Pavlides told the judge.
“The next couple of days, Olga, Roman and [son] Robert start to feel sick,” Pavlides said, noting the symptoms seemed to get better when they were outside and worse again when they were back in the house.
“Their dog starts throwing up,” Pavlides said, adding the dog died soon after.
Pinkhasov discovered mercury beads in the AC vent and called the cops, who found toxic vapors from the metal in “every corner of the house with levels so elevated, so high up that [a cop] tells them to leave the house immediately,” Pavlides said.
A month later, Department of Environmental Conservation officials found another cache of mercury beads inside the new AC unit, Pavlides told the judge.
The house wasn’t fully purged of the harmful metal until four months later.
All of the family’s clothes and furniture had to be replaced, and their house was practically demolished in the clean-up process, Pavlides said.
Blood work showed that the family all had high levels of mercury in their system, and they “still feel symptoms to this day,” Pavlides said.
“This could not have been an accident. …This was intentional,” Pavlides said, adding, “Everywhere this defendant was, mercury was found.”
Defense lawyer Marvyn Kornberg argued, “At the end of this case, you’re going to find if mercury was placed in the AC vent, there are a number of people who could have placed it in that vent.
“This is strictly a circumstantial evidence case,” Kornberg added.
Trial is set to continue Wednesday.