“Hernando, Mississippi — Ilya Beloozerov was on the run. He drained his bank account, canceled his cell phone and sped away from his quiet life in suburban Virginia. After a few days on the road, the Russian-born American citizen befriended a couple living in a parking lot next to a McDonald’s. He told them he’d”, — write on: www.cnn.com
Hernando, Mississippi —
Ilya Beloozerov was on the run.
He drained his bank account, canceled his cell phone and sped away from his quiet life in suburban Virginia.
After a few days on the road, the Russian-born American citizen befriended a couple living in a parking lot next to a McDonald’s. He told them he’d give them $30,000 to buy a pickup truck and take him to California.
Beloozerov had a suitcase full of cash, nearly a dozen laptops, and a seemingly untraceable ride. All that was left was finding a place to ditch his SUV that he’d driven from Virginia.
But on a sunny fall morning, as he finalized plans for his cross-country escape, a team of federal agents swarmed him outside a Super 8 hotel in Hernando, Mississippi, and gunshots rang out. When the smoke cleared on October 4, 2024, Beloozerov’s body lay splayed out on the pavement amid shards of glass from his car window. He’d been hit by at least five bullets.
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Nearly two years later, federal authorities have said nothing about who Beloozerov was or why they fatally shot him.
But a CNN investigation, including a review of bank statements, personal documents and interviews with coworkers, friends, and relatives, found that Beloozerov led a secret double life, unknown to his family and confidantes – but highly alarming to federal authorities.
Behind his public persona as a doting father who liked to play chess, the émigré held a United States security clearance, maintained at least one Russian dating profile and, according to expired passports, had traveled to both Russia and Ukraine in recent years. Among his possessions at the time of his death were a Social Security card and multiple IDs belonging to different dead men, a common way to craft fake identities.
For the last two years of his life, Beloozerov worked for a company that produced high-resolution satellite imagery, including sensitive information about the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Weeks before he was killed, CNN learned, his employer contacted authorities with concerns about him.
In interviews with federal agents and later with CNN, his family dismissed the notion that Beloozerov may have been a spy. He would never betray the US by sharing secret intelligence, they said.
But at times, they have harbored doubts. After all, Beloozerov had grown up fiercely anti-Russian, the son of a Soviet-era dissident, and as an adult he strongly supported Ukraine – even sending a care package to soldiers on the front lines.
Could he have been convinced to help the Ukrainian war effort another way? One thing was certain, they said: He would never help Russia.
“It’s crystal clear, how much he was pro-Ukraine,” Beloozerov’s son said.
Since Beloozerov’s death, questions about why he was being pursued by the FBI and why agents killed him have tormented his loved ones. The bureau, which faces little public accountability in fatal shootings, declined to comment for this story.
“No one ever should die like this,” said his former wife and the mother of his 18-year-old son, herself a Russian-born immigrant. “I need to understand why.”
Born in the Soviet Union in 1974, Beloozerov was raised by his mother Lena and stepfather Nikolai Beloozerov, a Soviet dissident and a mathematician, among a community of intellectuals in southwestern Moscow. The USSR was in flux: The country’s military had invaded Afghanistan and Lena feared Ilya would one day be forced to fight. Nikolai’s identity as a dissident made remaining in the country dangerous. So the family left, arriving in the United States in 1987 and settling in Virginia.
Nikolai’s anti-Soviet views had a lifelong impact on the younger Beloozerov: “Ilya (identified) himself as a son of the Soviet dissident – that was a defining feature,” said Beloozerov’s former wife, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym, Marina, out of concern for her and her family’s safety.
Beloozerov appeared to embrace life in the United States. He made the dean’s list at the military school where his parents taught, and later attended Virginia Tech. He sometimes wrote political letters to newspapers, in one appearing to reject his Russian roots: “I immigrated to America with my family because I got tired of being a guinea pig in socialist-collectivist experiments in ‘the empire of evil,’” he wrote in a 1994 letter to the Roanoke Times.
Beloozerov built a career in IT, working for IBM in Boulder, Colorado, in the late ’90s, according to an online resume, before returning to the Beltway. He met Marina, who was living in Russia, through a Christian dating site in 2005, and in 2007, she moved to the United States. They married and had a son.
Beloozerov was eccentric. One family member recalled that he tried to sell a car on eBay in the late 2000s, hoping to be paid in gold bars and guns. Marina described how he liked to keep a gun next to his bed while he slept.
Lyubov Campion, who had known Beloozerov since the late 2000s and largely communicated with him by email, said most of Beloozerov’s friendships were online. “He told me, ‘I have many friends but I never met them,’” Campion recalled. “He didn’t have real friends, he had virtual friends.”
CNN Presents
Civilian or Spy: Death at the Super 8
The last person to talk to Ilya Beloozerov was Kennon Green, who was living out of his truck in a McDonald’s parking lot when Ilya approached him with an offer: $30,000 to take him to southern California. Days later, Ilya was shot to death by the FBI in a hotel parking lot. To understand what happened, reporter Isabelle Chapman meets Ilya’s family, and learns that the answer may lie in Ilya’s job as a contractor for the Department of Defense.
Aug 10, 2026 • 29 min
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Former colleagues described Beloozerov as a regular guy who sometimes met up for dinner and drinks after work.
“We were just holding down jobs and doing everyday work and going to have a beer and then come back home. Go to work, rinse, repeat,” said Tony Johnson, who said he worked with Beloozerov for a computer company on a government contract in the mid-2010s.
Beloozerov and Marina divorced in 2012 and agreed to share custody of their son.
His Facebook page, which CNN reviewed before much of its content was removed, almost solely showed photos of his son: the two of them at restaurants, playing chess and tennis, biking or visiting petting zoos. In 2018, he posted: “The love between a father and son is forever.” The next year, his son moved in with him full time in Virginia.
“He loved our child obsessively,” Marina said.
After his divorce, Beloozerov pursued relationships with Russian and Ukrainian women in the United States and abroad. In addition to his Russian dating profile, he had another on a global dating site. One former colleague recalled that Beloozerov had traveled to Russia to visit women he was dating, and a passport that expired in 2018 shows that he visited Ukraine for nearly two weeks in 2015 and that he was issued a more than yearslong visa for Russia the following year.
“He liked Ukraine, he always told me he wanted to live in Ukraine,” said Campion, who immigrated to the United States from Ukraine.
Beloozerov also spoke at length with Marina about his sympathies for the country after the Russian invasion in 2022. “He was adamantly, adamantly, wholeheartedly feeling for Ukraine,” Marina said.
Beloozerov’s son, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym, Alexander, due to the sensitive circumstances surrounding his father’s death, said his father even sent a care package to Ukrainian troops containing money, flashlights and tactical gear. The soldiers sent back an empty tank shell and a video thanking him.
“He was super anti-Russia and anti-authoritarianism, and he was a really big supporter of Ukraine,” Beloozerov’s son said.
In December 2022, Beloozerov was hired by Maxar Technologies, which provided satellite imagery to commercial customers, including CNN, and government clients, such as Ukraine and the United States. The company, now called Vantor, produces imagery that can document troop movements on the battlefield, show stockpiles of weapons, and provide a window into damage after an attack.
Beloozerov was a systems administrator on a contract for the Department of Defense, a role that called for at least a secret-level security clearance, a former Maxar colleague involved in hiring Beloozerov told CNN. Beloozerov’s son said he held one of the highest-level clearances, one requiring a background investigation every five years.
Nothing seemed amiss with Beloozerov or his job, his son said. But in the final months of his life, warning signs began flashing.
He began steadily draining his bank account, withdrawing $11,500 in August 2024, and nearly $9,000 that September. In early August, he purchased a round-trip ticket to Latvia for September 17. Shortly thereafter, he booked tickets to Estonia for the same departure date, before canceling and receiving a refund.
He soon realized that he’d triggered authorities’ interest.
Beloozerov twice ran into trouble as he tried to board flights to Europe, his son said. It’s unclear what flights he was trying to board. The first time, he said he’d been questioned by TSA agents and returned home. The second time, he told his son he’d been detained and questioned by the FBI, adding: “They’re coming for me.”
Maxar, meanwhile, identified an irregularity connected to Beloozerov’s employment, notified authorities and terminated him, a company spokesperson told CNN. The spokesperson, who declined to discuss Beloozerov’s role at the company, also said no data was compromised.
In their final days together, Alexander said Beloozerov asked him to go to his office and return his laptop and security cards for him.
Beloozerov told his son he had lied to the FBI – but he didn’t provide details – and worried that he would face felony charges, Alexander recalled. Alexander said he’d seen an email Beloozerov sent requesting legal representation in case he was charged with making false statements to a federal agent.
Meanwhile, Alexander said, his father made new preparations to leave the country. He bought a new phone, packed his car, and transferred both of his vehicles into Alexander’s name. Alexander said Beloozerov didn’t sleep at home, fearing the FBI would pick him up. Sometime during that week, Beloozerov gave Alexander a hard drive and told him that he’d buried $50,000 in the backyard for “when the time comes.”
Marina’s first inkling that something was wrong came on Thursday, September 26, 2024, when she couldn’t reach Beloozerov or her son. She sent an email to her ex-husband, demanding to know why he had canceled his and his son’s cell phone plans.
He didn’t respond. The next day, she drove to his basement apartment in Manassas, Virginia, to check on Alexander, who was then 16. Beloozerov wasn’t there, but her son was. The two got lunch and then she headed home.
Before he left town Friday morning, Beloozerov met Alexander for dinner. And then, in a strip mall parking lot near their apartment, they said goodbye.
“He said, ‘I hope I did an okay job raising you. I’m sorry it has to be this way – good luck with your life,’” Alexander said. His father also told him: “Make a Facebook account and I’ll reach out to you.”
On Sunday, an FBI agent called Marina, asking when she’d last seen her ex-husband and quizzing her about his other relatives. She was shocked.
“When the FBI is calling you about your family, you get really surprised,” Marina said. “My mind got paralyzed.”
When Marina called her son, he told her that Beloozerov had left and that he wasn’t sure whether he’d return. On Monday, their son gathered some belongings and went to stay with her.
On Tuesday, Marina wrote an email to Beloozerov with just a subject line: “Ilya when are yoi (sic) coming back???”
The following day, she wrote to Beloozerov again, telling him she would have to file an emergency custody petition. “Are you planning to return and when?” she asked.
Later that evening, she wrote another note. Their child missed him. “Please return,” she begged him.
When a bald man with a Russian accent approached Kennon Green at a McDonald’s, he thought he may have found a solution to his problems.
Green managed a parking lot for long-haul truckers just off the Arkansas interstate, near the border with Tennessee and Mississippi. He and his wife, Megan, lived in a truck parked there. One night in September, Green went to use the restroom at the fast-food restaurant. Beloozerov, who had been working on a laptop in a booth, approached him. The two talked late into the night. Beloozerov told Green his name was Eli and that he had an ex-wife and a son back home. He told Green that he worked at a Burger King.
Eventually, Beloozerov asked if Green could drive him to Southern California. Beloozerov had a DUI, he said, and was afraid to drive the distance himself. If Green was willing to do it, Beloozerov would give him $30,000 in cash: $10,000 up front for a truck and $20,000 when they arrived, Green said.
Green agreed.
Beloozerov parked his SUV in Green’s lot overnight. Then Green, his wife and Beloozerov spent the next several days planning their trip and eating meals Beloozerov paid for in cash pulled from a pouch around his neck stocked with $100, $50 and $2 bills.
“We had steak for breakfast and lobster for lunch,” Green said. “He was just a sweetheart.”
They went to Cavender’s, a western clothing chain, and Beloozerov bought Green new cowboy boots. They ate biscuits at a place Green had always loved.
On October 3, Green said he bought a used, red Ford F-150 with money from Beloozerov. Then, Green said, they stopped at Red Lobster before heading to Hernando, Mississippi.
The three of them checked into a Super 8 hotel. Beloozerov stayed in the room with Green and his wife. Green warned Beloozerov that if he laid a hand on his wife, “I’ll kill you dead as fried chicken.”
The next morning, the trio planned to run a couple of errands before heading toward California – including getting rid of Beloozerov’s SUV and getting tags for Green’s new pickup.
“It’s finally over,” Green said he thought to himself about being homeless. He had a brand-new phone and a new truck. With the money Beloozerov had promised him, he hoped to finish school to become a trucker and “be a real husband and support my wife.”
In the morning, Green helped Beloozerov shave his head and packed his clothes in a plastic tote. Then, the three went downstairs to the lobby, hoping to get breakfast before they hit the road.
“Hold up, Eli,” Green said he told Beloozerov. “I’ve got to get my deposit back.” Beloozerov walked out to the parking lot alone.
Green is deaf in one ear. When the shots rang out, he thought it was traffic on a bridge nearby.
Then, in the parking lot, Green said he saw a dozen federal agents holding weapons.
He couldn’t see Beloozerov. But soon, he learned that his friend was dead on the ground.
The agents interviewed Green and his wife beneath the hotel’s overhang, buying them lunch and asking them what they knew about Beloozerov. The agents went through the couple’s belongings.
“What in the world could he have done?” Green said he thought to himself.
Green said the FBI agents told them Beloozerov had weapons, though he said he and Megan never saw any.
“He didn’t have a weapon in the hotel room,” Green said. He asked an agent what had happened to his friend.
“It’ll be a real long time before anyone knows what this was about,” Green said the agent told him.
Aftermath and unanswered questions
Beloozerov was killed on a Friday morning. That evening, Marina was cooking dinner at her home in Rockville, Maryland, when a local police officer knocked on her door with the news: Her ex-husband was dead. Despite their complicated relationship, she was devastated.
“I instantly felt so much tenderness and love and pity to him, and anger that we couldn’t say goodbye. We couldn’t ask forgiveness to each other,” Marina said.
Beloozerov’s son said that while he and his father were close when he was young, they’d grown distant in recent years. Beloozerov’s death brought new perspective on their relationship.
“He didn’t really like people, he didn’t have a lot of love for anyone, except me,” Alexander said. “My dad was a great dad – miss him a lot. It took a lot of time and him passing away for me to understand all that.”
Several weeks later, after an autopsy, Beloozerov’s body arrived at a funeral home in Rockville. Marina was horrified by what she saw. He had been shot at least five times – in his right arm, his left leg, his right foot, and twice in his abdomen, said Constance DiAngelo, a forensic pathologist who reviewed funeral home photographs of Beloozerov’s body at CNN’s request. He had a large wound on his right arm that DiAngelo said could have been from a shotgun. There were marks on his face that he may have sustained when he hit the ground.
Just a few people attended Beloozerov’s funeral – a closed casket ceremony – at a Maryland cemetery in October 2024. In an email to Marina, the funeral home suggested avoiding a family viewing, saying it might “emotionally upset [your child] further because some of Ilya’s injuries cannot be concealed.”
Federal agents were still trying to unravel Beloozerov’s activities, his family soon learned.
Six weeks after Beloozerov’s funeral, the FBI peppered Marina with questions during an hourslong interview at the agency’s field office in Washington. Did Beloozerov have strong views on the Ukraine war? Had he traveled back to the region? Could he have been lured to help the Ukrainians?
Marina was adamant to the federal agents that her former husband could never have given secrets to another country.
“I laughed, and said, ‘What are you talking about?’” Marina recalled. “Ilya could never be a spy or agent or malicious mole. That’s not Ilya who I know.”
But as time went by, she began to wonder if his sympathies for Ukraine could have led him to share secret information to assist its war efforts.
“I think he could be lured (to help) Ukraine without hurting the US. That’s what I can believe,” she said.
One thing she was certain about – he would never help the Russians. He spoke to Marina often about his respect for those who protested Russian President Vladimir Putin, such as the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
“His position about the war in Ukraine, about the political situation in Russia to me was very clear – he did not support it at all,” Marina said. “He only saw bad things on the side of Russia.”
Alexander was not convinced his father would have given up classified information.
“People are going to believe what they want to believe,” he said. “And how it looks is: he was a Russian guy with contacts, running from the feds. What person in their sane mind that’s not a Russian asset would do that? And my answer is – that would be my dad.”
Even though they didn’t believe he could have betrayed his country, his family did find new signs that hinted at covert activities.
Marina came across a state driver’s license and a Social Security card for a man who died more than 10 years ago among Beloozerov’s possessions. She also found a work badge for a different dead man. Experts told CNN these sorts of identifications can be used to create fake identities.
Those details line up with other hallmarks of a figure ripe for spy recruitment, said Eric O’Neill, a former FBI counterintelligence operative. With his security clearance and his work at Maxar, both Russia and Ukraine could have tried to turn him.
“A systems administrator, they have the keys to the kingdom. These are the most trusted individuals in IT – these are the people who can create accounts, elevate access, escalate profiles,” O’Neill said. “He’s like the holy grail for a foreign intelligence service.”
O’Neill was less certain than Beloozerov’s ex-wife, though, that he would never help Russia. After all, he spoke Russian and had traveled to his birth country to meet women – and the Russian government is adept at cultivating spies.
“Now it could be Ukraine as well, right?” he said.
One thing was certain: The family and the public weren’t getting answers from the FBI.
After she visited the FBI’s Washington field office in December 2024, Marina heard little more from the agency.
Publicly, the FBI has only produced its standard press release in an agent-involved shooting, saying the bureau “takes all shooting incidents involving our agents or task force members seriously” and noting that its Inspection Division would investigate.
Local authorities also clammed up. The coroner in Hernando referred CNN requests to the FBI. The state medical examiner didn’t respond to repeated requests for information or records. A spokesperson for the Mississippi attorney general told CNN that the office decided not to prosecute the case after finding the use of force was justified, but declined to release records related to its decision or to answer further questions. The local police department did not conduct its own homicide investigation – the FBI told the department “not to touch it,” one Hernando police officer told CNN.
Hernando Police Captain Kyle Hodge said the department didn’t know the status of the federal investigation. “We really don’t have the authority to inquire.”
The silence around Beloozerov’s death isn’t an aberration.
The FBI doesn’t publish data on how frequently its agents kill someone or use force. The bureau conducts its own investigation each time an agent fires a weapon. The scene is secured, witnesses are identified, forensics are collected, and eventually, a report is written – but usually not publicly released. A shooting that complies with the agency’s use of force policy – which allows agents to shoot if they have reason to believe their lives or others’ lives are in danger – is considered justified. A shooting that does not comply with the agency’s policy may result in disciplinary action, but that action is also not typically publicly released.
That lack of transparency is troubling to critics like Mike German, a former FBI special agent and longtime civil liberties advocate who argues the agency should be transparent about shootings to demonstrate that it’s a “responsible law enforcement agency and not just secret police.”
“We give law enforcement the authority to take a life. It should be asking very little to require some public accountability when they do,” he said.
In Beloozerov’s case, a source familiar with the matter told CNN the agency deemed the use of deadly force justified.
On a warm spring afternoon, Marina sat in her living room in suburban Maryland sipping a cup of tea. It had been 18 months since Beloozerov’s death. Marina regularly visited his grave, lighting a candle and placing flowers on his modest burial marker – a metal cross bearing the word “Dad.”
She still had no word from the FBI about the circumstances of her ex-husband’s death or the agency’s investigation.
But a source familiar with the investigation at last shed light on the case to CNN. The source said federal agents had evidence that Beloozerov tried to share sensitive information with people whom he believed to be Ukrainian. He did so at a key moment in the conflict – just as the US government was limiting certain satellite imagery sharing with Ukraine because the Biden administration feared it would escalate the conflict with Russia, a source said.
As the agency investigated Beloozerov, a source told CNN, agents learned he had been duped.
In fact, the source said, he’d been communicating with people the agency believed to be Russian operatives – posing as Ukrainians.
Marina reacted to this news first with shock.
“That was the thing which I was not mentally prepared for,” Marina said.
But soon, her surprise turned into anger. Anger toward the people who encouraged Beloozerov to pass information to them, and anger toward the agents who killed him.
“I know that he is a terrible criminal and enemy of the state,” she said. “But I think he’s a victim.”
Before he left town, Beloozerov gave Alexander a gift: A hard drive with thousands of photos of Alexander’s childhood – he and his father at the beach, flying a kite, playing chess together.
And when the time came, Alexander went to his father’s backyard. Toting a shovel, he dug up a military ammunition box from beneath a pile of leaves and dirt.
Inside was $50,000 in cash.
Editors – Matt Lait and Tim Elfrink
Executive Producer – Patricia DiCarlo
Director of Photography – Sean Clark
Video Editors – Meg Pearlstein and Sean Clark
Senior Visuals Editor – Gillian Roberts
Senior Video Director, Enterprise – Nicole Bozorgmir
Photojournalists – David von Blohn, John Anglim
Graphics Editors and Designers – Annette Choi, Alberto Mier, Connie Chen
Photo Editors – Tristen Rouse and Austin Steele
Contributors – Katelyn Polantz, John Miller, Majlie de Puy Kamp, Casey Tolan, Gianluca Mezzofiore