When Tetyana Nikitana was shot to death recently as she left the school where she was a teacher, the suspect, according to police, was her former mother-in-law. Nikitian, 34, was a mother of two and an immigrant from the Ukraine living in Utah.
According to the Deseret News, the suspect in the shooting is 70-year-old Mary Nance Hanson, the mother of Nikitana’s ex-husband, Dan Jankowski. Police stated that Jankowski was not a suspect in the case, nor was a he a person of interest. “He is just a relative of the suspect,” said Lt. Don Hutson told the Deseret News
Police are still hoping to piece together the case, and determine the motives that Hanson may have had for such a gruesome act. Hanson was the one who called 911 after the shooting.
A study of the divorce record between Nikitana and Jankowski revealed the couple’s tumultuous divorce after six years of marriage, filled with fear and animosity. In those records, starting in 2005, Nikitana stated that she feared for her life and those of her children at the hands of her husband.
Jankowski, on the other hand, filed a large volume of divorce records the belief that his then-wife was attempting to frame him with domestic abuse. He was also very concerned that Nikitana would leave the country with the couple’s two children. That fear led to a dispute over the children’s passports.
There were hundreds of pages of divorce records filed by the couple. The records covered the more typical issues that arise in a divorce, like child custody and finances, but, according to the Deseret News, disputes seemed to range into less conventional territory. There were arguments over playground equipment, gold crosses for the kids, wooden plates. There were also much more serious issues, including suggestions of child neglect, threats and domestic violence.
The divorce was filed in 2005, yet the dispute was still going on through December of 2009.
Police obtained a warrant to search the home shared by Hanson and Jankowski. In an interview with KSL in Salt Lake City, Jankowski said that he did not know why his mother would want to kill his ex-wife, and that he had had concerns about the state of her mental health in the past. Jankowski also spent a large amount of time, even hours, talking to police.
“I had no idea she was going to do anything like this,” Jankowski said about his mother, Mary Hanson.
Jankowski and Nikitana got a bifurcated divorce in early January of 2006, which meant that the union was dissolved but that they still had to figure out certain legal decisions. In August 2005 and January 2006, Nikitana tried to get protective orders against her husband, claiming, according to the Deseret News, that “her husband forcefully picked her up and threw her onto the floor in front of the children, leaving bruises and red finger marks.”
Jankowski firmly denied these allegations.
Nikitana had faced scrutiny from the Division of Children and Family Services when, in 2003, she faced a charge that she had left her children in a car alone while she went to a beauty salon. The case was resolved after DCFS visited their home and found it clean and the children healthy.
