The longest day: Inside the Bovina standoff
Above: Justin Geraghty and his son in 2013. Photo courtesy of Liahna Cole.
Around lunchtime last Sunday, Peter Mullin and Victoria Charkut were in their Catskills backyard in the town of Bovina, enjoying the warm August sunshine. Showtunes played on the radio and laundry hung on the fence as Charkut knitted on the back porch. Mullin was working on their new deck.
Suddenly, there was a man in their yard, twenty feet away, aiming a shotgun at them. Get in the house, he told them. He threatened to kill them if they didn't.
Terror ripped through the couple. Mullin, the gun trained on him, began to walk up the steps, but Charkut, frozen with fear, was rooted to the porch. She asked the gunman not to hurt them. He aimed the gun at her and told her, again, to go inside.
It looked to Mullin and Charkut like the man had been running. He was sweaty and covered with dirt, and smelled like alcohol. But the hands aiming the gun at them were steady.
Above: A stretch of County Route 5 the day after the standoff. Mullin and Charkut's house is in the stand of trees on the left. Photo by Julia Reischel.
For Mullin and Charkut, that was the moment that will haunt them for the rest of their lives. For 32-year-old Justin Geraghty, the gunman, it was a moment of no turning back.
Twelve hours later, after a standoff with police that had the entire town of Bovina sheltering in fear, Geraghty was dead in Mullin and Charkut's house, his body found in a wooden sauna located in a second-floor bathroom. He had killed himself.
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