General News
Meropi Kyriacou Honored as TNH Educator of the Year
NEW YORK – Meropi Kyriacou, the new Principal of The Cathedral School in Manhattan, was honored as The National Herald’s Educator of the Year.
Dimitrios Pagourtzis loved violent video games, guns, wore a trench coat in Texas weather and T-shirts emblazoned with killer messages, but officials said still there weren’t any red flags indicating he would come out shooting when he gunned down 10 classmates.
He was a churchgoing ex-football player and honor student who wanted to join the Marines — but instead became a suspected mass killer, the New York Post wrote in a feature.
He hadn’t been arrested nor was on the radar of law enforcement. In 2012, Pagourtzis was named to his middle school honor roll. In 2016 he was a defensive lineman on the Santa Fe High School junior varsity football team.
He did Greek folk dancing at his church, competed in a national history contest — and once traveled with his family to New York City, happily posing in front of the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.
“Unlike Parkland, unlike Sutherland Springs, there were not .?.?. warning signs,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said, referring to two previous mass shootings, after Pagourtzis was arrested
for opening fire in the school. “His slate is pretty clean.”
But secretly, the 17-year-old student was sketching out his massacre in private journals — including an ultimately unfulfilled plan to kill himself at the end of the rampage, Abbott said.
Pagourtzis was known at school as “weird” and a “loner,” other students said — one who had grown only weirder this year, when he began wearing that trench coat every day and posting odd things on social media.
“He never seemed that right,” Alex Neal, a Santa Fe freshman who used to sit next to Pagourtzis in a business class, told The Post.
“This year, what weirded me out was he started wearing a trench coat, and he started being about Communism and stuff, wearing like little pins and stuff. I know earlier in the year he told me he was buying knives off of Amazon.”
He explained in the photo what each pin represented: a hammer and sickle for “rebellion”; a German Iron Cross for “bravery”; a satanic Baphomet goat idol for “evil” and a Japanese rising sun for “kamikaze tactics.” That same day, he also posted a T-shirt with “Born to Kill” emblazoned across it.
It was the same outfit he would wear three weeks later when he stormed the school with a shotgun and a revolver, witnesses said.
On April 24, Pagourtzis posted a photo of a handgun and a knife on Instagram. “Hi f—kers,” he wrote.
And hours before the shooting, he wrote “Dangerous Days” alongside an occult symbol, a law enforcement source told CBS News.
Pagourtzis had discussed buying guns and liked war-based video games — but “he never talked about killing people or anything like that,” said his friend, Tristen Patterson, 16.
Some students said Pagourtzis had been bullied at school, The Post wrote.
“He’s been picked on by coaches before, for smelling bad and stuff like that,” Dustin Severin, 17, told NBC affiliate KPRC.
NEW YORK – Meropi Kyriacou, the new Principal of The Cathedral School in Manhattan, was honored as The National Herald’s Educator of the Year.
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