VANCOUVER — The family of a 36-year-old woman who was shot to death in a Chicago parking lot in April 2011 is suing the website that allegedly helped her killer, a Surrey man, buy the murder weapon.
A wrongful-death lawsuit has been filed in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois, against armslist.com by the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, on behalf of the family of Jitka Vesel.
Killer Dmitry Smirnov met Vesel online and the two dated briefly in 2008 after he moved to Illinois to be with her.
When the two broke up and she resumed dating a former boyfriend, Smirnov moved back to B.C.
In April 2011, Smirnov drove to Seattle to buy a .40-calibre handgun and ammunition. He arrived in the Chicago area on April 9 and stalked Vesel for four days, using a GPS unit he attached to her car.
On April 13, Smirnov shot Vesel 11 times in the parking lot of Chicago’s Czechoslovak Heritage Museum.
Smirnov fled, but later surrendered to police. He pleaded guilty to killing Vesel and is serving a life sentence without parole.
The lawsuit alleges that Smirnov illegally purchased the gun from a private seller whom he located through armslist.com, an online classified site owned by the website.
The complaint alleges that the site’s design encourages and enables users to evade laws that allow private sellers to sell firearms only to residents of their state by enticing prospective buyers to find gun sellers throughout all 50 states.
According to a statement, this is the first lawsuit in the U.S. against a gun website for causing a shooting.
“Gun sellers and website operators who facilitate the arming of killers and criminals must be held accountable. We as a nation are better than an anonymous Internet gun market where killers and criminals can easily get guns,” said the Brady Center’s Jonathan Lowy.
The person who sold Smirnov the gun pleaded guilty to the illegal transfer of a firearm to an out-of-state person and was sentenced to one year and a day in prison.
