On the morning of March 1, 2008, Tigran Khachatryan woke up in high mood – it was spring.

“He entered the kitchen and said: “Mom, happy first spring day!” He knew that I love spring,” tells Alla Hovhannisyan, mother of the 23-year-old who became a victim of March 1 tragedy.

Sunday’s first day of spring will have a very different meaning for the Khachatryan family.

Tigran Khachatryan was the first victim registered in the morgue on March 1, 2008, and he is among the three victims killed by means of the ‘special technique’ belonging to the Police.

The student at the Agricultural Academy was also a beginner businessman: Tigran was running his own taxi service, and he was planning to enlarge his business.

“He was not politically active, but he was worried that the demonstrators were dispersed by means of beatings. He said he would go to figure out what had happened,” says his mother.

“He was calling often saying that everything was fine. But at about 21:00 PM I started having a foreboding of something – Tigran’s mobile was not responding.”

After looking for him at hospitals and police stations they found their son at the morgue at 2:00 AM.

“My husband and younger son did not manage to find him anywhere. And on the way home they saw emergency machines at the morgue, they got out and asked to check, and they found my son in blood.”

The mother was looking for an answer at home:

“Did you find him? Where is he? At the police station? No? At the hospital? No? Where is he?”

“I got the answer to my questions in my husband’s and son’s tears; but I did not believe and now I do not believe and I do not understand why, due to which right did they take my son away?”

The questions were even more for Tigran’s 9-year-old sister – Evelina. The blue-eyed little girl was carefully cleaning her brother’s table full of his belongings; she looks at his photo and her endlessly crying mother, and she keeps silence.

The pain of her son’s loss was even doubled when she read in the Prosecutor’s document: “he was killed during participation in mass disorder.”

“How did you know, who proved that you labeled him that way?! How do you know that he was in the mass disorder, and may be you consider him to be guilty, too? That is why he was shot?” The mother says.

In the documents of the Prosecutor’s it is written that “Tigran Khachatryan, at about 20:00 along with several participants of the mass disorder, went to the Leo crossroad from Myasnikyan’s statue, and he died there at about 21:30”

Nevertheless, video material found in Tigran’s mobile phone provides other explanations.

The last video was shot by the victim at 21:19. He shot the demonstration held at the Myasnikyan’s statue for two minutes. It means that at 21:21 he was still at the Myasnikyan’s statue; so how could he be in the Leo Street since 20:00 and at the same time shoot the demonstration at the Myasnikyan’s statue? Or how could he manage to pass about a kilometer in 8 minutes and manage to appear in the Leo Street and ‘participate in the mass disorder’?! It is not clear till now. It is also not clear who out of the four police officers shot the young man. (see "They Mock our Dead").

“It is very hard when they kill your son and later do not even deign to commiserate. Moreover, they consider him to be guilty,” says the mother looking at her son’s smiling photo in tears. “Our children were treated as national betrayers.”

The first question the mother was asked at the examination at the Prosecutor’s was “who did you vote for?”

“What is the difference who I voted for? No matter who I voted for, you did not have the right to kill my child,” says the mother and continues, “I voted for Arthur Baghdasaryan, in fact.”

Alla Hovhannisyan says that she did not believe that her son had been killed by an Armenian: “I was thinking that they brought troops from Georgia or Russia, and they killed him. But when the Prosecutor’s said that the murderers are four Armenian policemen, I understood this is the end – an Armenian killed an Armenian. What else do we demand from Turks?!”

The only comfort for the son-lost mother is a just investigation and a punishment of those who are guilty for her son’s death. However, judging by the answers of the Prosecutor’s, the hope grows fainter day by day.

“It is evident that the case is being hidden, I mean we live in a country where anyone can kill the way he wants to, he can do whatever he wants to do, being sure that there will be no punishment.”