Fueled by PCP and cocaine, overwhelmed by anger and haunted by gruesome memories, 17-year-old Domenic Curcio shot to death his drug dealer to avenge the murder of a prostitute, Curcio’s friend testified yesterday.
“He said he couldn’t bear or stand listening to George [Conway] anymore and knowing what he knew, that George had killed Mikalena Nau,” Richard LePera testified yesterday at Curcio’s preliminary hearing.He said Curcio also couldn’t stand knowing that Conway had continued dealing drugs, with Michelle “Mikalena” Nau’s dead body, covered with pillows, lying on his Tacony apartment floor, “like it’s normal to him.” And Curcio couldn’t listen to the nonchalant descriptions that Conway had given them of the killing – how he had done it with his bare hands, duct tape and wire hangers – after Nau began acting erratically.
Curcio couldn’t stand imagining that the disarray of Nau’s clothes meant that she had been raped before being killed.
And, LePera said, Curcio could no longer deal with the image Conway created of disposing of the 37-year-old’s body.
“He wrapped her up in the rug, drove down the shore, ‘littering,’ like he chopped her up,” LePera said Conway had told them.
Police have not recovered Nau’s body.
LePera, who said he had been using cocaine and PCP with Curcio since before Nau’s February disappearance, saw the woman alive at Conway’s house early that month. Later that day, when he and Curcio returned to Conway’s home to buy drugs, Nau was dead, he said.
“I knew from talking to George that there was more than just us who had stopped over there,” Le-Pera said. “Like it didn’t really affect George that he told people to come over and buy coke when there’s a dead lady, like it’s normal to him.”
LePera said Curcio “broke down” after seeing the woman’s body, and talked about killing Conway.
“The day he saw Mikalena Nau dead in George’s apartment, he said we should go back and kill George. And, later that day, he [Curcio] does drugs and doesn’t mention it,” LePera said. “Within the next month or month after that, he might have said it two or three more times, that he should kill George.”
LePera said Curcio pulled one of his brother’s guns on Conway in the early morning of March 1.
As LePera testified, Curcio – who appeared as small and frail as a 12-year-old – sat crying and trembling at the defense table. He was ordered yesterday to stand trial in Conway’s murder.
“It’s a situation where my client witnessed a horror that he simply couldn’t live with anymore,” said attorney Brian McMonagle. “He saw the aftermath of this brutal murder.”
“Finally, he just snapped.”
Then, McMonagle said, “he took the life of the monster” who killed Nau. *