Holon man gets 16 years for stabbing man to death in 2022 road rage incident
Moped rider Adi Mizrahi stabbed Yuri Volkov in the chest during an argument after almost running into victim’s wife
The Tel Aviv District Court on Tuesday sentenced a Holon man to 16 years in prison for stabbing another man to death in a road rage incident in the central city in November 2022.
Adi Mizrahi, who was 23 at the time, admitted to stabbing Yuri Volkov, 52, during a brief confrontation after Mizrahi made an illegal turn on a red light on his moped, endangering pedestrians crossing a road, including the victim’s wife.
According to the ruling, Yelena Volkov, Yuri’s widow, had taken a picture of Mizrahi after he almost hit her.
He noticed that and told her to delete the photo, at which point she told him, “What do you want from me? Get out of here,” and attempted to keep walking. When Mizrahi continued to block her way on the pedestrian crossing and insist that she delete the photo, the victim approached and stood between the two asking, “What happened? What happened?” and told him to keep driving.
In response, Mizrahi took out a sharp object and stabbed Yuri in the chest, “while aware of the possibility of causing his death and deciding it was worth it,” according to the sentencing decision.
Mizrahi fled the scene on his moped and moments later the victim collapsed and lost consciousness. Magen David Adom paramedics administered first aid at the scene and took him to Wolfson Hospital in Holon, where doctors attempted resuscitation but were forced to pronounce his death just over an hour after he was stabbed.
Mizrahi was arrested a day later, and was initially held on suspicion of manslaughter, conspiracy to commit a crime, obstruction of justice, and aiding and abetting a crime after the fact. However, the charge was quickly updated to homicide following public outcry and anger from the victim’s family.
Directly after the incident, Yelena said that Mizrahi had seemed suspicious to her from the first moment. “I looked at him and knew that something was wrong, there was something about him,” she said in tears in a video shared by Ichilov Hospital, where both she and Yuri worked.
The sentencing decision came as part of a plea bargain, which the minority ruling said went “against public interest” due to the relatively short sentence.
“Just like that, the defendant murdered an innocent man who was protecting his wife. He was murdered by a street thug. An unfortunate incident that ended in an unnecessary death,” the judge wrote in the minority ruling.
Along with the jail term, Mizrahi was ordered to pay NIS 180,000 ($47,000) in damages to the victim’s family and a NIS 30,000 ($8,000) fine.
