They were closing a visa for a dead man.

Interestingly, the U.S. border service’s official explanation for Lesin’s posthumous travels turned out not to be the one that was considered the most plausible yesterday (see update 3), but the version we had considered and then dismissed at the outset:

We tried to verify it: yesterday and the day before, we looked for someone we knew who had had a relative or acquaintance die in the States. Then we dropped it, because you would need to find a Russian citizen who died in the U.S., had no green card, and was buried in the U.S. (even though in such cases the body is usually taken home), and so on. In other words, it is very hard to find a legally identical situation.

So we reasoned as follows: there was probably no rule under which a deceased person’s visa is specifically canceled. After all, the body was officially buried in the U.S., there is a grave, so on paper the trail is traceable and there is no situation where someone “entered and vanished.” And a visa has its own validity period—it expires on its own. I had never heard of anything like “closing a visa.”

Apparently there is, if they say so, although if anyone finds a document describing this “standard procedure,” please send it to us—we’d like to read it.

By the way, for future reference: yesterday one acquaintance of ours (he was actually flying in from the States) went up to the border officers and asked them about the return-ticket version. They said they could not be 100% certain, but the standard procedure is that the boarding pass is scanned into the database and checked against the passport. In the case of a private plane, the information is entered manually.

OK, let’s say that on the list of Lesin’s mysteries, next to the item “crossed the border after death,” we can now write: “there is a plausible explanation from an official source.”

Some will say: an official source also said the cause of death was a heart attack. And they will be right. Let’s wait for the FBI’s final report.

If you know something about Lesin that no one else knows, write to us via Black Box.