Tragedy strikes pianist

Associated Press

BENBROOK, Texas

An award-winning concert pianist arrived at his estranged wife’s home to pick up their two daughters and found the girls slain in their beds, police said Friday. Their mother, who had suffered knife wounds, faces a mental health exam.

Vadym Kholodenko stopped Thursday morning at the home where he formerly lived to pick up Nika, 5, and 1-year-old Michela, Benbrook police Cmdr. David Babcock said. The Ukrainian-born musician found his wife, Sofya Tsygankova, in an “extreme state of distress” and discovered the dead girls.

Kholodenko, a winner of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth, is not a suspect and is cooperating with police, Babcock said. Police said no suspects were being sought in the deaths of the girls or the stabbing of Tsygankova.

Tsygankova was being held on a mental health evaluation, said Babcock, who declined to say if she was a suspect in the girls’ deaths.

Kholodenko was a guest accompanist at a Youngstown Symphony Orchestra concert at Powers Auditorium in April 2015.