Sixteen Days.
Hernandez met Nikitina in on Easter of 2007. He was delivering Easter baskets to his brother’s apartment in the same building where Nikitina lived. “I was walking to the apartment and looking down at the Easter stuff, when I first saw these feet and shoes—and gorgeous legs. I looked up and saw Tanya, a beautiful lady wearing sunglasses and talking on a cell phone. It was love at first sight. The two kids were standing with her.”
It was a year before they agreed to date. Hernandez proposed to her on Aug. 15, 2009.
Before Nikitina moved in with him, Hernandez says she was always struggling to get by. “When she first came here, she didn’t know any English and she got odd jobs and worked at 7-Eleven,” Hernandez says. “After the divorce, her English still wasn’t the best, and she was alone, taking care of two kids with no one to help her.”
He says that all of the times Jankowski took Nikitina to court, it was because he didn’t want to pay child support. “Every time he took her back to court, his child support kept going up.” He says that Nikitina owed $16,000 in legal bills as a result of the continuing court battle.
Hernandez says that Hanson scared Nikitina, who referred to her former mother-in-law as her ex-husband’s “pit dog.” “Whenever there was a problem between Tanya and her son, he wouldn’t handle it, [Hanson] would.” Hernandez says that Hanson left messages on Nikitina’s phone, telling her the children should be with their father and that she was a terrible mother.
During his divorce, Hernandez had experienced his own custody conflict. After the custody battle relating to his two daughters ended, “My former wife grabbed her coffee and looked back at me. She said, ‘I had some people offer to kill you.’ ”
Reflecting on that situation, he says, “I imagine that the thought of killing their spouse crosses the minds of many people who are divorcing.”
About 2 1/2 weeks before her death, Nikitina “was leaning up against me while we were watching TV, and she suddenly became very upset. She said that if something happened to her, her children would go to that crazy family. I told her that was not going to happen, that we were getting married pretty soon and the children would be with me,” he says. Nikitina and Hernandez planned to marry on Valentine’s Day, 16 days after the day she was murdered.
“She had her wedding dress and had already given me my ring,” says Hernandez.
Jankowski views Hernandez as a solid and stable person and says, “It would have been a fine option for Tanya to have him around, it would have been beneficial for her and good for the kids, who still have a continuing relationship with Rod. I really do hope that the state of Utah and the entire country sees how important fathers are to children. Most fathers are not the runaway fathers and want to be there for their kids. Many are pushed out the door rather than leaving on their own.”
How To Heal.
Today, Jankowski chooses not to visit his mother “at this point in time. I don’t know what I would say or if it would be beneficial in any way.” His children drew pictures that he mailed to her. They also have many photos of both their mother and grandmother in their home.
Jankowski previously underwent therapy and both children currently visit a therapist. “They communicate to me and their therapist that they miss their mother. [My daughter] from time to time will start crying and other times say, ‘I want Mommy.’ ” He says that the children draw pictures, and he has a helium tank at home that the children use to fill balloons and attach messages to their mother.
Hernandez hopes to send his own message of hope for the future. In the ’70s, he played professionally in a band in the Las Vegas circuit. He quit playing in 1981 and has always missed it. He says that, during the time they lived together, Nikitina saw his guitars and photos of his band and asked him to play for her. “She kept bugging me about it. I told her that when we got married on Valentine’s Day, I would play for her.” To deliver on that promise, he and Nikitina’s former boss, Julie Peel, will hold a concert in Nikitina’s memory.
“In Memory of,” will be held 1-9 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 16 at the Utah Cultural Celebration Center, 1355 W. 3100 South in West Valley City. Proceeds will benefit Nikitina’s surviving children and other community services offering victim support. The public is invited to send photos to be included in a memory wall to honor those who have lost their lives to a violent crime (Visit InMemoryOfEvent.com). Featured will be the band Hot Sauce—a group Hernandez and other musicians recently assembled—as well as other live bands, cultural dancers, ethnic food, a citywide motorcycle ride, speakers and representatives from grief-support groups. A candlelight procession honoring victims will conclude the event.
“When this happened to me, for the first three months, I didn’t want to live. I was drunk every day,” Hernandez says. “I didn’t know about victim-support groups. They sought me out and helped me, and if it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t have survived.”
Today, Hernandez is the link between Nikitina’s sister, her parents—who currently live in the Ukraine but plan to relocate to the United States—and her children (see his blog here). While the children now live with their father, Hernandez continues to see them at their soccer games and on outings. “When I visit the kids, it’s hard on me because I want to talk about Tanya, and the kids say they aren’t supposed to talk about her.”
On a recent roller-skating outing at Hollywood Connections, Nikitina’s son said he wanted to go home. “When I said, ‘We’ll go home in a minute,’ he said, ‘I want to go to our home.’” Hernandez drove the children back to the house he shared with Nikitina. The boy “went to his bedroom, put all his toys around him and read a book. I missed my home the way it used to be with the music on and Tanya dancing around the house.”
While Hernandez doesn’t know what lies ahead, he needs to be prepared for life after the Oct. 16 concert, when he predicts he will experience a big letdown. “Every day, when I wake up, I think about Tanya. I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about her. Every day, I miss her so much. I want to dream about her, and I can’t. I hope to be able to dream about her someday, and when I can, she will be alive again.”
Tom M, please shut up. You are annoying, illogical, and crazy. You obviously hate anything with a vagina...GO TO THERAPY!
Hey Tom, Bitter much? I guess it's OK that a mother gets brutally murdered so the "father" can finally have his just dues? Now that's justice, for YOU, right?
I'd like to set some inconsistencies in this story straight. But first, I'd like to thank the City Weekly for several articles previous to this one which did shed a lot of light on the full truth about discrimination against and abuse of fathers and their children by both the system and by abusive women and their support organizations. Those truths don't surface very often in the media as a whole, due to hostile hate-agenda news sources which most of the media solely rely upon for domestic violence reporting.
1- The article show bias in favor of the views/propaganda of the UDVC (Utah Domestic Violence Council - anti-father-central) and their associates (such as Head Start). We see this bias and anti-father hate-group problem consistently when UDVC associates are relied on for the majority or all of the information for media news stories. This story has several items which blast Jankowski (and men and fathers in general) as being the root problem and contention causers. Not true at all, not even in this case. It was the mother (as in so many other DV/divorce murder cases) who had made repeated false abuse allegations (very serious abuse against spouse, children and society) and also violated court ordered parent time orders. This article makes it sound like Hansen wanted the children to ONLY be with their father, while the fact was that she only wanted court orders to be followed by Nikitina as equally by her son, which Nikitina unilaterally refused to do. Too often entitled, abusive women make up the majority of similar murders since they must always be in control, at the helm and make all decisions for EVERYONE (abusive characteristic?). Truth and justice are of no concern to them. The courts actually help and encourage and reward abusive drama queens to abuse, manipulate and constantly harass and abuse the fathers and children... This is a pandemic. Some few of these myriad targeted fathers see no end to the ongoing abuse and see the only means to stopping the constant abuse is to stop the abuser. they often don't see who all is behind the abuse or that most of this would never occur if it were not being coached and rewarded behind the scenes. Nobody will help these abused men and their children, esp not the UDVC or their bought and paid for courts, no matter how many times they take the abuse to the police or back to court to try to get it to stop. This does not make the father the bad guy for trying to stop the abuse, as suggested in this article like many others... Jankowski was NOT one of those types of few fathers who retaliate to end the constant abuse of themselves and their children. It takes about 500 to 1000 of these very abusive woman/mother cases to produce just one father who fights back like this, or as the grandmother did in this case (a surprise to all, including me).
2- We would all understand this same story if the genders were reversed. Most would certainly feel the murder was either justified or that the result was the unstoppable result of abuse if genders were reversed and the father was the abuser instead of the mother. Jankowski seems to be like most fathers, trying everything they can to win people over to believe/know for sure that they are not the abusers, and never have been, which they are constantly being accused of being. That's a hard rap to beat when the UDVC and media constantly teach that men are suspect and dangerous, when nothing could be further from the truth. Thus, most fathers in this situation are like Jankowski, they would never dream of retaliating against their abuser(s) and supporters - courts, police, prosecutors, media, etc... They refrain not only because they were non-violent all along, but also to prove their real non-abusive nature beyond a doubt to all. This is part of why so many mothers get away with tremendous never-ending abuse of spouse/ex and children while everybody sides with the abusive moms. The UDVC teaches all agencies they can that their anti-father lies, propaganda and agenda to break up families is the sole truth, not to be questioned. Very unfortunately most media do not question them.
3- This case also seems most likely related to the scam of foreign women coming here and discovering the best fast-track to citizenship and prize money is to simply falsely claim domestic abuse! It's faster, more sure, and they get more benefits for this too (free education, housing assistance, extra money from their victims, etc...), if they don't mind being shady and abusive. This immigrant abuse and false allegation scam is popular among illegals too, and goes on all across the US and has been reported on many times. Domestic Violence Coalitions all over the US recruit and coach and reward women for doing this and much, much more abusive, family-destructive and society-destructive behavior.
4- These politically correct, entrenched and well funded anti-father hate groups (DV Coalitions) are very active, which nationally act as central authority for pushing their very destructive hate-agenda. BUT, the real point is this: Even if these DV Coalition hate-groups desire to remain sexist and supremacist, just caring about women only, then WHY, WHY, WHY do they support the lies and hate-agenda which not only targets men and fathers but also must grind up so many women and esp their children as in this and so many other cases??? It has repeatedly been demonstrated that what puts women at highest risk of domestic violence injuries and death is THEIR OWN PRIMARY INITIATION of VIOLENCE against men in the first place. The Dept of Justice's BIG bilateral DV Partner Abuse Study showed that 71% of unilateral partner violence (committed by just one partner alone) is perpetrated by the WOMEN (71%!), not by the men, as was admitted by BOTH the women and men in this study (and in many more). Other studies likewise show that most mutual violence is started by the women being physically violent first and more often repeatedly violent before retaliation and self defense finally turns that unilateral partner violence into mutual violence "all along." Bottom line: If the DV Coalitions would tell the truth by first warning women and girls to NEVER hit a boy or man, to never be abusers themselves, for their own primary safety, we would not be seeing so many of these cases and related cases which start more often with violent women not men. This double-standard hate-agenda is directly responsible for this case and so many others. Remember, double standards are nothing short of supremacy and abuse. But for as long as UDVC assures that one gender remains supreme over the other (double standards) we will very unfortunately continue to see these the current escalated number of these stories for the duration of that hate-group discrimination against men and fathers.
Search: Researcher Says Women's Initiation of Domestic Violence Predicts Risk to Women
My advice to the media - get both sides, and remember, the UDVC has been proven over and over to be nothing less than a vitriolic supremacist hate group to the dire detriment of women too, and especially children most of all. You can't attack good fathers and not destroy the WHOLE family and society... Please, in the future, interview both sides, as ussually only the SLC Weekly ussually does!