"Evers" is a Bulgarian immigrant
Former OLCC official came to U.S. as a teen, disappeared while in college
By Keith Chu and Cindy Powers / The Bulletin
Last modified: May 29. 2010 6:47AM PSTWASHINGTON — The mysterious Doitchin Krasev is a Bulgarian immigrant who spent years changing identities and homes before settling in Bend as “Jason Evers.” He did it all, said the man who brought Krasev to the U.S., to avoid being deported to his native country.
Krasev came to the U.S. when he was 16 or 17 years old, said Michael Horowitz, a prominent Washington, D.C., attorney and human rights advocate who served in the Reagan administration. When he immigrated to the U.S., Doitchin spelled his name Krastev. As a student at Davidson College in North Carolina, and in federal court documents, he is named as Doitchin Krasev.
“Once he dropped out of college he was illegally in the U.S.,” Horowitz said. “There was no other way to stay. He was so smart, and he figured out a way.”
Authorities believe Krasev — who faces one federal count of falsifying a passport and an Ohio state charge of identity fraud — assumed the identity of Jason Evers in 1996, while living in Colorado. As Evers, Krasev climbed the hierarchy of the Oregon Liquor Control Commission, at one point becoming a regional manager based in Bend.
Horowitz was touring Eastern Europe in the early 1990s as an adviser to several Eastern European academies of science when he met Krasev's parents, Dincho and Krassi Krastev. Both were accomplished academics. Dincho is now director of the Central Library of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, while Krassi is a prominent scholar of Carl Jung.
Horowitz first met Doitchin at a dinner with the Krastevs, he said. The boy immediately stood out.
“I remember this vividly; it was almost 20 years ago now,” Horowitz said. “Doitchin was with us and he was so bright and so engaging and had so much sparkle to him, so much intelligence.”
Conditions in post-communist Bulgaria were dismal, as institutions eroded and the country struggled to transition to capitalism. So Horowitz instinctively offered to take Doitchin to the U.S. and help get him a scholarship to the prestigious Georgetown Day School, just outside Washington, D.C., where his own children had gone.
Today, Horowitz believes Krasev's experience growing up during such a dark time must have instilled in him the desire to avoid going back at all costs.
“Bulgaria was as bad as any place in the European world,” Horowitz said. “It may show the intensity of his desire to escape that hellhole of a world.”
When he came to the U.S., Krasev struggled in his first year to cope with his upside-down circumstances and an unfamiliar culture. Reading Tom Sawyer, with its colorful vocabulary, was especially hard, Horowitz said.
But Krasev loved his new homeland.
“We'd have these discussions and he'd say, ‘I'm not Bulgarian,” Horowitz said. “He told me, in Bulgaria the rules are unfair so people take what they can. In America people defend the rules even if they've lost the game.”
But as a senior at Georgetown Day, Krasev flourished, winning awards, including the Socrates Award, given to three students in the D.C. area who demonstrate “an uncommonly inquisitive approach to learning.”
“He just blossomed,” Horowitz said.
College years
Outside of school, Horowitz said, Krasev was always a diligent worker who got an after-school job to pay for his own car.
Krasev's turnaround earned him a scholarship to Davidson College.
There, a college roommate and former girlfriend remember him as the smartest and most interesting person on campus, but also as moody and mysterious.
Shannon Klein, Krasev's college girlfriend, said she fell in love with the smart, intense Bulgarian.
“I definitely loved him, and he loved me,” Klein said. “He was very loving and very smart and very passionate about everything.”
Matthew Griffith met Krasev his freshman year at Davidson, where they lived in the same hall. They became close friends and then roommates the next year.
“What's weird is I remember so many details about him, because he is far and away the most intelligent person I've met in my entire life,” said Griffith, now an architect in Raleigh, N.C.
One detail: Krasev told Griffith he didn't learn chess until he arrived at Davidson. By his sophomore year, Krasev had won a statewide chess competition.
They shared “the usual college shenanigans” and shot pool nearly every night, Griffith said. But their sophomore year, after the pair became roommates, “things started to get kind of weird.”
“Some days he would wake up and be really fun, and a really substantial person,” Griffith said. “Some days he would wake up and decide, ‘I'm not going to talk to people today.'”
Krasev studied political science and math. But by the second semester of his sophomore year, he mostly stopped going to classes.
Krasev also stood out for his conspicuous spending, which didn't match up with a job at a nearby Domino's Pizza.
Griffith remembered Krasev taking him to a large warehouse Krasev rented in downtown Charlotte.
“All he had in there was a huge drum set that he bought,” Griffith said.
And Krasev had at least three cars on campus at the same time: a Ford Probe, a Saab and a battered Toyota covered in bumper stickers, Klein said.
Not what he seemed
Eventually, Klein suspected that Krasev might be something other than what he seemed. Looking through his cupboards one day in search of gum, she found a Tupperware container.
“I found all these things to falsify documents,” Klein said, such as notary public stamps.
Klein and Griffith said Krasev experimented with different names. Griffith said Krasev sometimes went by “Dutch Kraser” or a similar variation. Krasev told Klein he was planning to change his name from Krastev to Krasev, or possibly Kaiser. Krasev later used both Kraser and Kaiser as aliases.
At the end of their sophomore year, Klein, whose maiden name is Simmons, left to study abroad. Neither she nor Griffith ever saw him again.
Both said they've often wondered what happened to Krasev.
“I've been waiting for somebody to call me looking for Doitch for 15 years,” Griffith said.
“I was really sad for a long time,” Klein said. “I thought he killed himself. I hoped that Doitch might feel like he owed me an explanation.”
Klein did talk to Krasev on the phone a few times after he dropped out of Davidson, she said. At one point he said he was doing voice-over work in Hollywood. Another time he said he thought their conversation was being wiretapped but didn't explain why.
Ultimately, Klein concluded that it was probably money trouble and the desire to avoid being deported that led Krasev to disappear.
“I thought in the end that he's from Bulgaria, and they were trying to deport him because he borrowed a lot of money and was not paying it back,” she said.
Their last conversation came in the summer of 1995. Klein was going to Oregon for a summer job.
“He said, ‘I'll find you in Oregon,'” Klein said. Krasev never did.
Meanwhile, Krasev cut off communication with Horowitz and his parents at the same time he left Davidson.
Horowitz and his wife tried for years to find him, contacting law enforcement agencies and hiring private detectives without success.
“There were times we thought we came close, but it never happened,” Horowitz said.
On to Colorado and Oregon
After leaving Davidson, Krasev made his way to Colorado sometime in the early to mid-1990s.
He rented a basement apartment from an elderly couple in a quiet south Denver neighborhood with manicured lawns and modestly sized homes.
The couple has since died. The home's current owner, Maren Scoggins, said her family moved in four months ago and had no idea Krasev had lived there until federal investigators knocked on her door this week.
A few neighbors had vague recollections of Krasev and considered him friendly enough.
Bob Barton said he's lived next door to the Scoggins home since 1994 and remembered Krasev as a painter and a student when he lived there.
“He was easy to talk to,” Barton said.
Krasev's OLCC application shows he partnered with a Denver couple in a food-delivery service venture where he worked nights and weekends from 1998 to 2001.
Denver fly-fishing guide Chris Galvin considered Krasev a close friend, though Galvin knew the man as “Danny Kaiser.”
Galvin said Kaiser went by several names and kept his past to himself. He did make references to East Coast connections and hinted at a troubled relationship with his father.
“I think I got about as close as you can get to someone who is so guarded,” he said.
Krasev seemed to have a command of several languages, including Russian, Romanian, French and Spanish, Galvin said.
It was the East Coast connection, though, that was the final confirmation of Krasev's identity, said Patrick Durkin, a San Francisco-based Special Agent in Charge with the U.S. State Department' Diplomatic Security Service.
“We did some interviews on the East Coast and witnesses there confirmed his identity,” Durkin said.
Contact with his family
When federal investigators contacted Horowitz late Thursday evening with the news Krasev was still alive, and in federal custody, the first reaction was relief.
“My wife immediately started sobbing just to know that he was alive,” Horowitz said.
He immediately called Krasev's parents in Sofia, Bulgaria.
“It was a state of shock,” Horowitz said. “They never wanted anything from him but to know that he was alive.”
After speaking to Krasev's defense attorney and seeing the support the man has had from his days living as Jason Evers, Horowitz said he's both proud of the life Krasev built and sad that it will likely evaporate.
“We're so thrilled and grateful for the support that he appears to be getting from the people in (Oregon),” Horowitz said. “In that sense he got what he had hoped for and what his parents had hoped for.”
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