The Tsar and Tsarina and all of their family, along with several family servants, were executed early in the morning during the night of July 17, 1918, by a detachment of Bolsheviks led by Yakov Yurovsky. Alexandra watched the murder of her husband and two servants before Peter Ermakov killed her with a gun shot to the left side of her head before she could finish making the sign of the cross. Ermakov, in a drunken haze, stabbed her dead body and that of her husband's, shattering both their rib cages.