By Michalis Kakias
NEW YORK – With tears in her eyes, and in immense pain, the mother of Manos Ikonomidis, Maria Mytiliniou, spoke exclusively to the National Herald and cannot believe that in one moment her soul broke into a thousand pieces.
“I lost my boy,” she said in a shaky voice, “they killed my Mano, the angel of my life. Why God, why so much pain, why?”
Throughout TNH’s visit on Tuesday morning to the family home in Gravesend, Brooklyn, in order to express condolences to the parents and relatives, the tearful mother held her late son’s shirt, which she constantly caressed and kissed.
“Only his clothes are left of him to touch,” she said crying, “I raised him alone with many sacrifices. I separated from his father, Nikos, when Manos was 5 years old. I was alone in a foreign country and worked two jobs to raise him. And now they killed him. How will I endure, how to find the courage and power to raise my other child, my 5-year-old Stella?”
She asked that TNH, the only newspaper she chose to speak with, to “write positive words about my Mano. He was a very good and kind boy who helped the world. Even when he was bleeding and asked for help at the next apartment, he apologized for the inconvenience. That was my Manos.”
“He loved Greece, every year he went on holiday to find his beloved grandparents and now I have to go to the morgue to identify his body. My angel is there now.”
According to the police, Manos Ikonomidis collapsed in the corridor of building in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn where earlier he was reportedly in a ménage a trois with a 21-year-old man and a woman. The erotic triangle culminated in a murder when one of the participants began to videotape, angering the woman who called her boyfriend who did not participate in the erotic act and told him she had been raped.
The 21-year-old, who lived in the apartment, took the woman to her Staten Island home. When he returned, Ikonomidis decided to leave. As soon as he walked into the corridor, the surveillance cameras record two whites and one African-American chasing him, and then hitting him with a bat and stabbing him in his chest and back. Covered in blood, Ikonomidis knocked on the door of a nearby apartment and said he had been hit in the head.
“He tried to get up,” the woman in the apartment said, “and collapsed on the floor. All of his body began to tremble and when the ambulance arrived he barely had a pulse.”
Ikonomidis died at New York Methodist Hospital in Brooklyn.
When TNH asked about the funeral arrangements, the mother said she did not know anything yet.
“I’m waiting to bring my relatives from Greece first,” she said.
Maria Mytiliniou comes from Ikaria and Marios’s father, Nikos Ikonomidis, from Karpathos. Maria after the divorce has remarried and has a 5-year-old daughter, Stella.
In breaking news, Christopher Membreno, age 24, was arrested and charged with murdering Manos Ikonomidis, as reported by the New York Post.
Membreno is reportedly the woman’s boyfriend whom she called telling him she had been raped.
The post TNH Exclusive Interview with Mother of Manos Ikonomidis appeared first on The National Herald.