NEW YORK – A 24-year-old New York man charged in the stabbing death of 20-year-old Manos Ikonomidis said he was the victim of lying by his girlfriend, who said she had been raped instead of what police said was a consensual threesome.
“I threw my life away for a f—ing lie? My life is over because of a f—ing lie?” a weeping Christopher Membreno asked a Daily News reporter in an exclusive jailhouse interview.
He said he didn’t remember what happened in the June 19 attack in the hall of a Park Slope apartment in Brooklyn, but that Ikonomidis fought back after Membreno and two friends he brought. Τhe woman ηas not identified and isn’t facing charges so far.
He said he was upset when he went there because of what his girlfriend said had happened to her. She sounded “distraught, scared,” he told the newspaper, so he called friends and went looking for Ikonomidis.
“I just wanted some f—ing justice,” Membreno said at Rikers Island. “I wanted to hold him until the police got there.”
Police said the gang viciously attacked the victim with baseball bats and knives, leaving him to die in a pool of blood in the hallway of the building before taking off.
Membreno claims he was high at the time and doesn’t remember many details of the murder.“He was fighting me. I had to defend myself. I had to fight back,” he said.
Police say there is no evidence the victim was ever on the offensive.
Ikonomidis, with four stab wounds in his chest and back, managed to knock on the door of a nearby apartment before collapsing.
“They stabbed me! They stabbed me twice! They stabbed me!” he told the stranger who answered the door. “I’m so sorry,” the paper reported.
Police said the woman agreed to have sex with Ikonomidis and 21-year-old Jack Doherty but then became upset when Ikonomidis started filming the act.
They said she then sent his girlfriend a text message: “Your boyfriend f—-d up and will be taken care of,” sources said.
NYPD Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce said last week that detectives were still trying to piece together exactly what happened during the doomed fling in Doherty’s apartment.
“We have a competing narrative in this case,” Boyce said. “We’re still trying to decipher exactly what happened that day.”
That was news to Membreno.“Did she set me up? I deserve to know the truth,” he told The News.
A memorial service will be held for Ikonomidis on June 26 at Dahill Funeral Home in Bensonhurst. He will be buried following a funeral Mass scheduled for June 28 at Saint Nicholas Church.
The post Remorseful Alleged Killer of N.Y. Greek Man Says Girlfriend Set Him Up appeared first on The National Herald.