Tampa Tribune
Saturday January 7, 2006
'Horrible Tragedy Began' In Rice Paddies Of Vietnam
Nick
Nicholaou,
left,
and his
sister
Joy say
their
father
loved
his
family
but
never
recovered
from the
horror
he
experienced
in the
Vietnam
conflict.
CLIFF MCBRIDE / Tribune
Published: Jan 7, 2006
TAMPA - When police showed up at the pink stucco house on West Walnut Street on New Year's Eve, a woman told them the couple were inside. They had been yelling.
Officers followed her and moved through the house, a spokesman would later say. They announced their presence and pushed open a bedroom door.
Police didn't know it then, but the three people inside loved one another.
They didn't know that Aileen Chambers had responded to Michael Nicholaou's personal ad seven years ago, which asked for a friend and mother for his two children, and that they had been together through happy vacations and drug-induced arguments. They didn't know that Nicholaou thought the world of his stepdaughter, 22-year-old Taryn Bowman, and told friends he loved her like his own.
They didn't know about Nicholaou's mysterious past, either. Not many people did.
He flew a helicopter through Vietnam and carried back 15 medals and memories that haunted him almost every day. He ran a porn shop called the Pleasure Chest, waited tables at restaurants and told his children he worked as a narc for a police department in Virginia.
There on Walnut Street, as the bedroom door swung open, police saw a gun and scrambled. The door slammed shut. Then came two shots.
'A Front Seat To The Carnage'
Nick Nicholaou turned 18 Friday. He is supposed to bury his dad Sunday. He wants a real military funeral, one that honors a man who sacrificed for his country.
"This was his flight jacket," he said. "He was a Cowboy."
That's what they called the 335th Assault Helicopter Company.
Michael Nicholaou joined in 1968 and served until 1971. During the early tours, he flew men and supplies into hot zones and hauled the wounded out. He told a friend he had to clean the blood out of his helicopter with a water hose.
"It wasn't pleasant," said Tom Gould, of Dothan, Ala., who flew with Nicholaou.
"We weren't in the infantry," said veteran Jack Milenki, of Riverview. "We didn't walk around in the jungle before we fought. We fought war every day, day in and day out."
"Some people have a real rough time with it," said Nicholaou's crew chief, Russ Stibbe, of Kansas City, Kan. "I didn't think or speak about Vietnam until 1991."
That trauma stuck with Nicholaou. He was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and sought help. He spent two months at a Veterans Affairs clinic in Miami and met with a psychiatrist here.
"This guy had a front seat to the carnage," said Richard Borrelli, who grew up with Nicholaou on Long Island. "Twenty-two hundred missions he flew. It's almost incomprehensible that a human mind could absorb all of that carnage and not be affected."
The thing that affected him most, those who know him said, was the loss of his friend Tommy Furnish. Furnish was a young pilot killed in action. Nicholaou blamed himself.
He went to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington a few years ago to find Furnish's name on the wall. He talked to it for hours, crying, said friend Todd Lippman, who owns Lippman's Automotive. Before they left, he made a rubbing.
Tommy Furnish.
It was his most valued possession. What happened to it may have been what triggered his rage on New Year's Eve.
A Battle Rather Than A Family
The psychiatric treatment helped, but Nicholaou was still haunted by nightmares and flashbacks. Once he and son Nick went to see the movie "Black Hawk Down." During a dramatic scene, Nick noticed something was wrong.
"He was foaming from the mouth. It was like a seizure or something. He fell onto the guy in the row in front of us."
There was more.
"He'd get angry," Borrelli said. "That's part of the deal, part of the syndrome."
But he never abused his children, said Nick and daughter Joy, who is 19. He loved them and he loved Chambers, whom they call mother.
To complicate matters, Nick, Joy and two of the couple's friends said Aileen had been abusing Vicodin, a prescription painkiller. She had mood swings and a violent temper, they said.
"From then on it was a battle; it wasn't a family," Nick said.
Just over a month ago, Nicholaou had sent Chambers to a rehab center in North Carolina and he had moved to Georgia, Nick said. That's where the string of events that led to the shooting started.
Nicholaou was renting a house in Hiawassee, Ga., when Chambers left rehab and showed up looking for drugs in early December, Nick said. The couple fought for hours.
Nick said Chambers got hold of Nicholaou's rubbing of Tommy Furnish's name and set fire to the paper.
"My dad was crawling around on the ground trying to grab the ashes," he said. "He was just crying."
Nick said his father left Georgia that day and arrived in Tampa long before Chambers. Several people in Tampa confirmed that. Nick doesn't know when she arrived or how her arm was broken. All he knows is that the police have said Nicholaou was stalking Chambers. He says that's not true.
Nick last saw his father alive on Dec. 29. He was clean-shaven, dressed in a suit. He said he was headed to the VFW.
No one knows what happened after that. Police said Nicholaou and Bowman arrived at 3321 W. Walnut St. just after noon on New Year's Eve. When the police came, two shots were fired. Nicholaou and Chambers were dead. Taryn was taken to a hospital, where she died that night.
"This horrible tragedy began in the rice paddies of Vietnam," Borrelli said. "The VA did what they could for him, but you can't cope with something like that. He suffered with those demons for 40 years, and they finally got ahold of him, and they won."