One year later, Burning Man's first killing has no suspect

The 37-year-old artist, a Russian national living in the U.S., was dead in a pool of blood at his first Burning Man. He died Saturday, Aug. 30, 2025, from a single stab wound to the neck.

The killing marked the first homicide investigation in Burning Man's history, forcing law enforcement to solve a murder in a city designed to disappear.

The case remains unsolved as Burning Man returns this week, bringing tens of thousands to the Black Rock Desert 100 miles north of Reno. The festival opened Sunday, Aug. 30, and runs through Sept. 7.

Days after Kruglov's body was found, the crime scene was gone. There were no neighbors to question, no retracing Kruglov's last dusty steps.

Any witnesses could have scattered across the world.

People in the pop-up city spend the week escaping everyday life, often shedding their real identities in favor of playa names.

"Some stick so religiously to using their playa name that you never find out their real one," Burning Man says on its website.

All of that creates the ultimate challenge for Pershing County Sheriff Jerry Allen.

Outside of Burning Man, Allen oversees a county of about 6,000 residents spread across 6,000 square miles of rural Nevada.

Burning Man increases his jurisdiction by more than 1,000%.

The festival consumes most of his already-stretched resources in an environment filled with challenges, from weather to narcotics to injuries and illnesses. And now, a year later, Allen is still tasked with solving a homicide in a temporary city that is dismantled as fast as it rises from the desert.

Where the Burning Man homicide case stands

Allen told the RGJ the homicide investigation remains active, but there isn't much new information, despite it taking nearly all his investigator's time over the past year. That sole investigator left in July and hasn't been replaced yet.

There are some new leads and progress, he said, but none of it has led to a suspect.

Recently, a lab identified five new DNA samples on a piece of evidence. The hope is that one of the DNA samples gets a hit in a criminal database or ancestry platform.

But even that can take months for a match.

Allen said the case is even more complicated if no hits are found in the United States. The investigation will look for matches in unfamiliar and hard-to-navigate databases in other countries.

The sheriff's office also has made progress by working with investigators at Reno-Tahoe International Airport.

"There's a 99% chance that person flew in and out of the airport," Allen said.

Is the case on the minds of this year's Burners?

Burning Man CEO Marian Goodell said organizers have no new information to share and that the investigation remains solely in the hands of the sheriff's office.

After Secret Witness, a Nevada nonprofit that allows people to anonymously submit crime tips, offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to an arrest, Burning Man added another $5,000.

"Burning Man Project is committed to the safety of our community and to supporting those working to bring justice in this tragic case," the organization wrote on its website Sept. 10, 2025.

"It all befuddles me in an environment that is as it is, which is obviously very friendly and connected," Goodell told the RGJ earlier this summer.

"At the time, it was unnerving for people," she said. "But that seems to have passed."

"We haven't seen that as something that is deterring people from coming," Goodell said of what she called a tragic event.

Burning Man has not released the number of tickets sold this year.

That absence of concern worries Kruglov's friends, including Christopher Spiro. The two became close when Kruglov lived in New York before moving West. Kruglov visited Spiro shortly before heading to Burning Man last year.

"He was so excited to go," Spiro said.

Spiro and another friend traveled to Reno to identify Kruglov and take home his ashes because his father and sister remain in Russia.

"I'm less sure we'll ever know the longer it goes," Spiro told the RGJ. "We want people to keep talking about him so there is pressure to solve this."

That concern isn't lost on Allen.

"If somebody doesn't get found out and properly prosecuted, and their feet aren't held to the fire, I worry it emboldens someone to do it again," he said.

The night of the killing

Sgt. Nathan Carmichael, the Burning Man commander for the Pershing County Sheriff's Office, said the call came in as thousands watched the Man burn.

A passerby reported the homicide.

It's a bustling, dynamic scene where screaming and yelling aren't out of the ordinary. Hearing something unusual, if it could be heard at all above the noise, likely wouldn't have raised suspicion.

Carmichael said it took him roughly five to six minutes to reach the scene while navigating crowds, bicycles and vehicles. He had been stationed just outside the crowd to monitor the Man burn.

Black Rock City is laid out in a semicircular grid with sections aligning with clock hands intersected by letter-named streets. In the days following Kruglov's death, the Pershing County Sheriff's Office asked anyone near J Street and 8:45 during the Man burn to come forward with information.

The camp looked much like many others at Burning Man, with rugs, seating areas and a large kitchen island set up like a bar, open to passersby.

But the spot where Kruglov died would disappear days later.

Allen compared the challenge to solving a homicide in a city where nearly every resident moves away at the same time and every building vanishes.

"In a normal investigation, someone might paint their house or do a remodel, but the crime scene is still there to go back to," Allen said. "Even when Burning Man comes back, none of it is ever the same."

No surveillance

In most cities, detectives rely on surveillance cameras to trace a suspect's movements.

At Burning Man, there are none.

"There are no doorbell cameras. There are no security systems pointed across the street," Carmichael said.

The lack of video evidence has left Pershing County relying heavily on witness statements, physical evidence and DNA testing.

At the time of the killing, roughly 70,000 people were in Black Rock City.

"Everybody is a suspect," Allen said. "And right after this happened, thousands were racing back to their camps, packing up and leaving."

The knife

Investigators released a photo of the style of knife used to stab Kruglov and asked the public for help identifying its owner.

Allen said investigators attempted to trace the knife, contacting the manufacturer and asking for a complete set while seeking information about who may have purchased that type of knife.

But the manufacturer had stopped making the knife about five years earlier.

Resources of a rural sheriff's office

The investigation has stretched the capabilities of a small rural agency.

Pershing County has limited investigative resources and rarely handles major homicide cases.

Allen said he doesn't have the resources to conduct as extensive an investigation during this year's Burning Man as he would like. In a perfect world, he said, investigators would canvass attendees for information about what may have happened.

He said surveillance companies offer help each year so Black Rock City can be monitored more closely. But the cost would consume as much as 25% of his annual budget for an event that already demands nearly every resource his office has.

Still, letting the case go unsolved isn't an option for Allen.

"Everybody has this misnomer that a crime like this can be solved in an hour with commercials," he said. "The public perception is that if it can't be solved in a week, that's unreasonable.

"And anything longer than that, we'll hear whatever bad thing you can think to say about law enforcement."

While it's still unclear how many people will return for this year's event, one of them won't be Kruglov's friend, Christopher Spiro.

"I thought I would go to Burning Man after Vadim was so excited about it," he said, recalling the countless conversations they had before last year's event. "But now I just can't imagine it."