Friends: Student Monk Sad, Isolated

Months before he allegedly got drunk and stabbed a Holy Cross Academy nun to death, Mykhaylo Kofel had grown disenchanted with religious life, according to sworn statements made public Wednesday.

The 18-year-old Ukrainian monk-in-training looked sad. He told those close to him he wanted to pursue a different vocation.

”He wanted to be a nurse, he told me,” Daniel Puerto, the West Kendall school’s chief maintenance man, told homicide detectives two weeks ago. ”We were playing [basketball], and I told him, ‘Soon you are going to be a father abbot.’ He says, ‘No, I don’t want to; I don’t want anything to do with being an abbot.’”

Statements from Puerto and several others were released by the Miami-Dade state attorney’s office this week. They paint a portrait of a young man far from home, isolated by school officials and increasingly disillusioned with life within the Byzantine Catholic academy.

On March 25, Kofel allegedly broke into the nuns’ house on school grounds and stabbed Sister Michelle Lewis 40 times, according to court documents. He is charged with first-degree murder.

After his arrest, Kofel told detectives that Father Abbot Gregory Wendt and Father Damian Gibault — the school’s highest-ranking officials — had sexually abused him since Wendt brought him to South Florida four years ago. Both men deny the charges.

In the wake of the killing, a fellow Holy Cross student told detectives Gibault deliberately isolated Kofel and four other Ukrainian student monks — forbidding them from talking on the phone, socializing with other students or discussing sex.

”We were really not allowed to socialize with them, but I didn’t really care because I felt sorry for them,” student Danelys Perera told detectives several days after the killing.

”We were not allowed to give them any notes saying they were cute or any party invitations or ask for their phone numbers or socialize with them, because they are going to work for God,” Perera said.

The school has insisted the student monks were not being held captive. They were free to leave the monastery whenever they wished, school officials have said, and one student monk even returned permanently to the Ukraine.

Assistant State Attorney Gail Levine said she believed the student monks led unusually isolated lives, although investigators’ attempts to figure out why have been thwarted by the school.

Neither Wendt nor Gibault would talk to prosecutors unless granted immunity. Joseph Blonsky, a Holy Cross board member, refused to answer Levine’s questions earlier this month — including how Kofel and the other student monks were brought to the United States, and whether the academy was associated with any other churches in the area, according to transcripts of his interview.

Investigators are also trying to get a clearer sense of the school’s religious beliefs.

”Did Father Abbot [Wendt] ever tell you that he was God?” Levine asked Perera.

”Not as far as I remember,” the teen answered.

”And did you ever believe that Father Abbot could have been Jesus Christ?”

”I never believed it, no.”