Helping friend cost Valley vet his life

By ED RUNYAN

runyan@vindy.com

CAMPBELL

Cynthia Tsarnas says her son Michael “was a very loving boy. He had a heart of gold.”

She raised him to always help people. But on Oct. 13, “the wrong person” cost him his life.

Tsarnas, 41, died after being stabbed at a home on Warren Avenue in Niles, where he was helping a young woman in his aviation mechanics program at the Pittsburgh Institute of Aeronautics in Vienna move out.

Melissa R. Stroud, 19, was leaving the apartment she had shared with her ex-boyfriend, Edward D. Anderson Jr., 20.

“It was just a classmate he went to help,” Cynthia said of her son.

“She called him to help her. I always told him to help people. [Stroud was] one person I wish he would have told no,” Cynthia said this week from her home on Reed Avenue, where Michael lived with her and her husband, Drosos.

Stroud also was stabbed and went to the hospital to be treated but has since returned to school.

“I didn’t know who she was. I didn’t know who the boy was,” Cynthia said of Stroud and Anderson.

“He was a good kid. Any person in Campbell, Warren, Canton who knew him cried for my son,” she said. His funeral was at Archangel Michael Greek Orthodox Church. “People just cried – people I would have never expected to cry,” Cynthia said.

Michael was the father of one child and had about a year left in his aviation mechanic training. He also had done factory work, been a painter and worked in the asphalt industry, she said. A Campbell Memorial High School graduate, he also worked in aviation mechanics while in the Air Force.

Joseph DeRamo, PIA campus director, said Tsarnas was an “upbeat, happy, very-well-liked person” at the school and “would volunteer his labor and his truck for anybody who needed him.”

He also recruited other students to help out, DeRamo said. “That’s just the kind of guy he was.”

Because Tsarnas was older than most students and had already worked as an aviation mechanic in the Air Force, he was “kind of like a mentor” to the younger students. “They looked up to him because he knew a lot about aircraft.”

Students in the program are together from 8 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. every day, DeRamo said. So even though Tsarnas had only been at the school less than six months, “he and his classmates had grown pretty close. There was a big hole in the school and in the class” when he died.

“The kid was a true hero to serve his country and the community,” DeRamo said.

“He was a precious person in my heart,” Cynthia said, noting her son’s sense of humor. “All of my children are. We were close.”

When asked about the details of his death and Anderson’s actions, she said, “I don’t really want to know. I just hope [Anderson] gets what he deserves. I’m trying to be a Christian.”

A Trumbull County grand jury indicted Anderson on murder and felonious assault charges. He remains in the county jail in lieu of

$1 million bond.

Niles police say Anderson arrived at the apartment about 5 p.m. while Stroud and Tsarnas were cleaning out Stroud’s belongings. A confrontation ensued, leading to Tsarnas and Stroud being stabbed multiple times.

Anderson also pointed a firearm at Stroud and fired, prosecutors have said. The shot apparently missed.

Niles police found Anderson in the back of the home “covered in blood” and took him into custody.

Stroud alleged in a Sept. 20 protection order petition in Trumbull County Family Court that Anderson had struck her on multiple occasions. The order was approved. Stroud, however, did not appear for the Sept. 27 “full hearing” to extend the order, and the case was dismissed Oct. 4.

Anderson’s next pretrial hearing in his murder case is Nov. 19.