WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (Court TV) — A South Florida dentist is behind bars facing a list of charges after prosecutors say he attacked his wife in their home and threatened to kill her.
Sergey Korol (Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office)
Sergey Korol, 63, is charged with false imprisonment, battery by strangulation, aggravated assault and weapons offenses after allegedly attacking his wife at their home over the weekend.
Deputies with the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office said they were dispatched to the family’s home after the victim’s daughter called them to say her mother sent her an emergency text telling her to get her younger sister and grandmother out of the house. The alleged 49-year-old victim said in the text to her daughter that she was trapped in the bedroom with her husband, who was threatening to kill her. Deputies were ultimately able to get the victim safely out of the home and to a hospital.
Once at the hospital, the victim gave a recorded statement to investigators telling them that the incident with her husband began on Saturday evening after she put her 5-year-old to bed and joined Korol outside for drinks in the courtyard. There, they drank tea and champagne and smoked cigarettes, she said, while they discussed a fight they’d had from the night before.
After the couple went inside, Korol suggested they use cocaine, and the victim said she obliged. Then, she said, the mood began to drastically change as her husband accused her of cheating on him and demanded answers. At that point, she said, Korol pulled a Taser out of a drawer and used it on her “at least five times in the chest, demanding to know who she was cheating on him with.”
The woman said she was able to escape to the home’s courtyard, but Korol caught up with her and took her to the ground, pulling her hair, punching her in the face and choking her. She said Korol took her back to the bathroom, where he grabbed a red rope and tied her hands together behind her head and the rest of the rope around her neck. “All the while, Sergey Korol was threatening to kill her and interrogating her about infidelity,” investigators wrote in the statement. At some point, the victim said, Korol untied her from the chair and led her “around the bedroom by the rope wrapped around her neck.”
Investigators say the victim told them that the defendant threatened to make her watch her kill himself, then jumped on top of her and threatened her with the gun, saying it was time for her to die. “Then he put the barrel of the revolver on her eye and said, ‘I’ll kill you and your children will see you like this.’ In the next instant, he moved the revolver next to her head and fired the revolver one time,” investigators wrote.
The victim then convinced Korol to untie her, she said, and the two continued talking until they went to bed. Once she had her phone, the victim covertly texted her daughter. “This incident was constantly escalating and deescalating,” officers wrote in a report reviewed by Court TV. “There would be extended periods of resting from exhaustion, drinking champagne, talking, smoking cigarettes and using cocaine.”
The alleged victim suffered bruises to her face, abrasions to her wrists and ankles and chipping to her upper teeth, officers said.
Korol is being held on bonds totaling $130,000. He is actively licensed as a dentist in Palm Beach County, with no complaints or disciplinary actions on file.
