Murder Case Yields Sex Abuse Complaint
On the day Holy Cross Academy honored a slain nun, officials on Friday adamantly denied allegations of sexual abuse at the Byzantine Catholic school.
The Miami-Dade Police Department confirmed it had ”received a report of a lewd and lascivious fondling of a child” between Jan. 1, 1997, and Jan. 1, 1998. State law prohibits police from giving additional information, they said.
But sources said the abuse allegation came out of the recent murder investigation at Holy Cross. An 18-year-old monk-in-training allegedly stabbed Sister Michelle Lewis on March 25 in a convent on the academy grounds.
Mykhaylo Kofel has confessed to killing Lewis and is charged with first-degree murder and armed burglary with assault or battery. He is being held without bond at Miami-Dade County Jail.
The allegations of sexual abuse are ”absolutely untrue,” said attorney Joseph Blonsky, a board member for the school. ”We have already suffered two incredible blows. Now comes this third one, out of the blue, supposedly from the young man involved. This is unbelievable.”
Prosecutors are still deciding whether to seek the death penalty for Kofel. But they have filed papers to keep that possible legal option available.
”No final decision has been made,” Ed Griffith, spokesman for the state attorney’s office, said late Friday. ”But we want to keep the door open.”
The charges against Kofel – and the probe into possible sexual abuse at the academy – have drawn more than a half-dozen lawyers into the case.
Attorneys Hired
Four employees at Holy Cross Academy, 12425 Sunset Dr., have hired criminal defense attorneys. In addition to a janitor, nun, abbot and assistant abbot, the school itself has hired a criminal lawyer since Lewis was found slain there last weekend.
The allegations of possible sexual abuse shocked some connected to the school.
”I went there since I was in fifth grade, until I was in 12th grade, and I never even heard anything like that,” said former student Mayra Rosales, now 25. ”It was a very small community, and there was never any indication they’d be sexually abusive. There’s never been any talk about that.”
Kofel, a Ukrainian national, told police investigators that he got drunk and stabbed Lewis because she was verbally abusive to him. He had been in training for over four years and was considered by many to be a model trainee.
Holy Cross Academy, affiliated with the Byzantine Catholic Church, selects teenagers from a monastery school in western Ukraine to come to the Kendall-area private school to train.
Passports Held
On Thursday, a judge ordered the school’s attorney to store the passports of four other student monks after Kofel’s public defender, Edith Georgi, said she wants to interview them about evidence in the slaying.
She said she feared the abbot could send them back to Ukraine.
Lewis, 39, was found dead in a convent bedroom on a Sunday morning after she was missed at Mass. She was naked, but an autopsy detected no signs of sexual assault.
Laboratory tests of body fluids have not been released.