Monk Held In Murder Of Nun
18-Year-Old Trainee Guides Dade Detectives Through Scene At School
An apprentice monk was under arrest Monday for the murder of a nun at a West Kendall school. Mykhaylo Kofel, 18, a Ukrainian citizen training at Holy Cross Academy, confessed to the stabbing and later walked Miami-Dade Police through the crime.
The naked body of Sister Michelle Lewis was discovered Sunday morning in the school’s convent after she failed to appear at Mass. Police would not say whether she was sexually assaulted.
Lewis, 39, handled administrative and financial affairs at the school and taught calculus. Kofel had been at the Byzantine Catholic school about four years as a high school student and monk in training.
Miami-Dade Police Director Carlos Alvarez said homicide detectives questioned Kofel late Sunday and he confessed. He was charged with first-degree murder, armed burglary and using a weapon to commit a crime.
On Monday afternoon, Kofel led two detectives and two crime scene technicians from the convent at 6950 SW 123rd Ave. to an estate next door where he apparently left some evidence.
Across the avenue, just over the fence of an exotic animal farm, the crime scene men stopped to measure and photograph a wine bottle that Kofel apparently tossed there after the murder: Mavrodaphne of Petros, a sweet red Greek wine.
Kofel looked glassy-eyed as he sat in the back seat of an unmarked county police sedan. He wore handcuffs and a black short-sleeved cleric’s shirt, open at the collar without a white insert.
A scraggly mustache and beard made him look a little older than 18.
On the left side of his face were two fresh scratches, one on the cheek and the other just above the mustache – injuries he may have received in a struggle with the nun.
Alvarez said Kofel killed Lewis between late Saturday night and early Sunday morning:
”At Mass on Sunday, the victim failed to show up. People got concerned. They asked another person to check on her whereabouts, and once they went to the house where she resides, they discovered the crime scene.”
If Alvarez knew a motive for the crime, he wasn’t saying.
”This was not a random act of violence,” he said. ”The victim and the subject knew each other.”
‘A CANDIDATE’
Joseph Blonsky, a lawyer who is on the school’s board of directors, said Kofel is not exactly a monk: ”He’s a candidate to become a monk. There are a number of stages. He’s a learner, in the early stages of candidacy.”
Blonsky said Lewis didn’t come to Holy Cross directly from a convent. She used to be an insurance statistician:
”She was such a lovely woman . . . very much involved in the administration, in the financial aspect of things. I hate to use the word `bookkeeper’ because she was so much more than that.”
Blonsky said priests and the school’s headmaster, the Rt. Rev. Abbot Dr. Gregory F.G. Wendt, spoke with parents and students Monday and counseled some of them.
Except for Blonsky, Holy Cross Academy’s leadership went silent.
Reporters and photographers were turned away from the Sunset Drive entrance by a uniformed policeman who said his orders were to let nobody in. Phone calls to the school office were not answered.
FOUNDED IN ’85
Holy Cross Academy, at 12425 SW 72nd St., was founded in 1985. It educates about 500 students from kindergarten through 12th grade.
The school is run by a Byzantine monastic order of the Eastern Catholic Church, whose theology is similar to Roman Catholicism but with differences in doctrine and liturgy.
The monastery falls under the jurisdiction of the Byzantine Catholic Eparchy of Passaic, in West Paterson, N.J.
Holy Cross Academy occupies a large tract of land along Sunset Drive between Southwest 123rd and 125th avenues. Lewis and at least one another nun lived in a plain beige one-story house with about 150 feet of frontage on 123rd Avenue. A wooden fence, seven feet high, bars the view from the avenue. The house is set back about 100 feet, with a large mango tree near the middle of the front yard.
It is separated from the rest of the campus by an open field, 100 or more yards across. Monks live in a dormitory on the far side of the property, a police officer there said.
Sunita Balani, a 1999 Holy Cross graduate attending the University of Miami, said the academy has separate monasteries for nuns and monks. Kofel was in her philosophy class two years ago, Balani said:
”We were told that he was in monk training and would be very quiet. We were told to respect this. He came from Ukraine with two other exchange students. They didn’t mingle with the students.”
DIDN’T SOCIALIZE
Claudia Negrette, valedictorian of the 1999 class, said she remembers attending school with Kofel, but didn’t get to know him:
”Really, the Ukrainian people, we weren’t allowed to communicate with them. They were just to themselves, because they knew each other and they spoke the same language. They never, ever socialized with us.
Those are the last people that I would ever think would do something like that. They came to America to become priests. They were very calm, quiet people. They were always happy, they were very grateful to be here because Father Abbot gave them the opportunity.”
Herald staff writers Meg Laughlin, Amy Driscoll, Nicole White, Tere Figueras, Sara Olkon and D. Aileen Dodd and researcher Ruthy Golden contributed to this report.