
Background on one of the “pukes” from a NYT article:
[i] Over the years, the state’s Department of Correction has had trouble spelling Mr. Komisarjevsky’s name correctly.
It is a name with an illustrious history: Mr. Komisarjevsky’s great-grandfather, Fyodor, was an opera singer in Russia who married a princess. Their son, Theodore, was a popular theatrical director said to have put on a “King Lear” worth crossing the ocean to see. Theodore�??s last wife, Joshua�??s grandmother, was an American, Ernestine Stodelle.
“My mother was a beautiful avant-garde dancer who danced with the seminal dancers of modern dance, and my father had left Russia at the time of the revolution to escape the Communists and directed theater in London and in New York,” said Mr. Komisarjevsky’s uncle, Christopher Komisarjevsky. “That was the kind of environment we grew up in.”
After Theodore died in 1954, Ernestine married John Chamberlain, a conservative newspaper writer who owned some 65 acres of land in Cheshire, the crowning glory of which was a pre-Revolutionary home, complete with wishing well.
That is where Joshua Komisarjevsky spent many of his teenage years with his parents, Benedict Komisarjevsky, who ran a construction company, and Jude Motyka, who home-schooled Josh and his sister, Naomi. The family had also taken in foster children, and when Mr. Komisarjevsky was 14, he was raped by one of them, his mother told an investigator for the state’s Department of Children and Families.
That was the year Mr. Komisarjevsky started breaking into homes. In 2002, he confessed to more than a dozen burglaries, and was sentenced to nine years in prison followed by six years of supervised parole. But the state’s Board of Pardons and Paroles has admitted mishandling his case by granting him parole in April 2007 without first reviewing a copy of the 2002 sentencing transcript, in which a judge called him a “calculated, cold-blooded predator.”
The parole board ordered him to wear an electronic ankle bracelet for 90 days, and officials extended that period for several more, so they could monitor his return home each night. Within 72 hours of its removal July 19, the authorities said, Mr. Komisarjevsky was burglarizing homes again in Cheshire. Within 96, he was inside the Petits’.[/i]