When shots were heard from the direction of the television tower, the noisy crowd dispersed towards the fence. According to witnesses, the last to run from the shots were 4 boys. Darius Gerbutavičius was the first to fall down: he had been shot in the legs. He was already by the fence and was hanging on to it with his hands, trying to climb over it, when his hands were shot. The fifth bullet in his back was the last.
Darius was born on July 14, 1973. This year he would have been just 18. He lived a simple life, like most people his age. He was watched over by the careful eyes of his parents. He was attached to his home and liked to spend evenings in his corner of a room where, he had a tape-recorder and some books. The calm and careless days of childhood.
After finishing 8th grade at school Nr.43 with a 3 (out of 5) average, his whole family decided - let him be a carpenter. So Darius entered Vilnius building school Nr.13. His mother was quietly happy - with this profession he definitely wouldn't starve.
Now his classmates have industrial practice. The boys are sent out to various building sites. At school I found his group teacher Genė Jurkūnienė.
--He was an honest and calm boy. He was the kind of boy that doesn't grab your eye - he didn't like to stick out or interrupt anything. My pupils were really shaken up by his death: I could see their eyes filled with tears, wishing to do anything they could before seeing their friend to the last journey.
A person dies - a star falls. How difficult this endless grief is for the despondent mother... In her mind, the sights of the night that she lived through change one another. In vain she tries to explain it to herself - how, what for?
--Today, as I was standing by the tower, I thought - destiny. Crowds of people were standing one next to another... Destiny chose our child, my only son. It was a difficult birth, we brought him up in great fear. How should we live now?
That evening his parents walked to the door with Darius, who was warmly dressed, to see him off. Darius said that he was going to go with his friends to stand by Parliament. Hearing the first shots, his mother had a bad feeling and rushed to the phone. She called Darius' friends until morning. His friends said that they had been together, but when they began to shoot they all scattered. They didn't see or know anything.
Probably, none of them had seen or knew, but shocked by the tragedy, they did not dare to tell the truth, naively hoping to repudiate the horrible news.
The parents found their son. After finding him, they laid out his corpse at St.Teresa's Church. -The one consolation - he will lie in his own soil, and not in Afghanistan.
This is a painful consolation for a mother who no longer has something to comfort herself with. Let her be consoled by the tears of all Lithuanian mothers - they mourned for Darius as if he was their only son.
Lithuania, 1991.01.13 : documents, testimonies, comments. - Vilnius : State Publishing Center, 1992, p. 43.