Nikolay Soltys

On August 30, Soltys was arrested in the backyard of a family member's home without incident in Citrus Heights, California. He hanged himself in Sacramento County Jail on February 13, 2002.

After 9 a.m. on Monday, August 20, 2001,the killings started at three locations; two in the suburbs of Sacramento, with the third alleged to have taken place in a field in Placer County, adjacent to, the north of, Sacramento County.

During one violent encounter Nakonechnyi claimed that he and his brother went to the married couple's residence and tried to take their sister back home. Soltys retaliated and tried to attack the brothers with an ax. After this incident, Soltys left Ukraine, leaving his wife and newborn son and joined his parents in New York (state) in 1998. After he arrived in New York he ended up jobless after a car accident injury and was collecting welfare assistance.

In 1998 the U.S had limited the number of Soviet refugees allowed to enter the country to 50,000. As of 1995, priority was provided to designated groups of former Soviet citizens that the U.S. Congress had recognized as probable targets for persecution. The groups included Ukrainian Catholics, Evangelical Christians, Jews and followers of the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church.

Soltys was able to join his parents in 1998, using their status as persecuted Evangelical Christians, which gained his parents entry into the United States.

Before 10 a.m. Soltys left the North Highlands murder scene. Witnesses told detectives he had fled in his 1995 silver Nissan Altima. He drove to the home of his aging aunt and uncle in Rancho Cordova, also a suburb of Sacramento, approximately fifteen miles southeast from North Highlands.

Shortly after his son was born, Nikolay left Ukraine and traveled to Binghamton, New York, where his parents had settled in the mid-1990s. Family members say Nikolay's parents had moved to the United States under the 1989 Lautenberg Amendment to the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act, a policy that allowed refugees from post-Soviet states to migrate to the U.S., which included Ukraine.

Later an auto mechanic contacted the authorities and told them he had worked on the vehicle that Soltys was driving Monday evening. He described the vehicle as a mid-1990s emerald green Ford Explorer with the color silver at the bumper line and below. The mechanic said Soltys' son, Sergey, was with the suspect at the time. He said he had worked on the car around 8 p.m. and had removed cargo rails from the top of the vehicle.

Nikolay Alekseyevich Soltys (May 19, 1974 – February 13, 2002) was a Ukrainian fugitive charged by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California in a Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) issued warrant for Soltys' arrest for unlawful flight to avoid prosecution and California State arrest warrants for seven murders of his family members in and around the Sacramento area in August of 2001.

On August 23, he became the 466th fugitive to be placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list.