Soldier’s widow slain by father symbolized grief of war and passion of youth

By Ryan Lenz

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) Lavinia Gelineau’s grief-filled odyssey began a year ago when her husband was killed in an ambush by Iraqi insurgents, just a few weeks before their second wedding anniversary. She spent the following months attempting to ease the pain by lending support to other widows of soldiers.

She visited graves, left flowers and notes and attended funerals at each ceremony clutching a bright pink teddy bear her husband, Christopher, had given her on Valentine’s Day.

The story took a final, tragic turn last week: Gelineau’s estranged father brutally strangled her with a rope in her home before hanging himself.

On Saturday, she will be buried alongside her husband in Portland.

Police have said Gelineau’s parents had a history of domestic violence in her native Romania, and Gelineau had voiced concerns about her safety to friends before she agreed to allow her father, Nicolae Onitiu, 51, to visit her new home.

Investigators are unsure what sent Onitiu into a murderous rage and plan additional interviews before closing the case.

Gelineau told friends he was prone to angry outbursts and had once tried committing suicide, but she hoped he had changed. Her mother, who was in the United States staying with her daughter, was still afraid and left for Vermont when she learned her husband was visiting Portland.

Lavinia Gelineau had come to the United States to study at the University of Southern Maine. Those preparing for her funeral remember a storybook marriage in April 2002 of a fellow student, the unexpected death that tore the couple apart, and the devotion that inspired everyone who knew them.

Spc. Christopher Gelineau was one of four soldiers from the Maine National Guard’s 133rd Engineering battalion who were wounded in an explosion outside Mosul. Insurgents opened fire in the ambush and a U.S. medevac helicopter was sent for the victims.

Gelineau, who grew up in Starksboro, Vt., died April 20, 2004, while waiting for the helicopter to arrive. He was the 100th U.S. soldier to die during one of the war’s deadliest months.

About 400 students and guardsmen came to his funeral a ceremony that culminated with Lavinia Gelineau playing a guitar and singing Richard Marx’s ’’Right Here Waiting.’’

In the months that followed, the young widow would send e-mails to friends with a verse from the song pasted next to ’’L & C Forever.’’

The Gelineaus’ marriage was one to envy, said Margaret Reimer, an English professor who taught both while they were students, and developed a relationship with the worried young wife after her husband left for Iraq.

Reimer remembers the palpable sadness at Gelineau’s wake last April, when his widow stretched out along the length of her husband’s coffin, rested her head on the cold metal and wept.

’’I was looking at what it truly meant to have your heart break,’’ she said.

Lavinia Gelineau sometimes visited the cemetery twice a day to sit by the heart-shaped granite marker bearing the couple’s names and a poem written about their visits to Lake Champlain in Vermont.

’’I knelt with one knee only and looked at the photos of Chris and me that I had placed in the display case,’’ she wrote in an e-mail a month before her own death. ’’Two beautiful young people who were gonna show the world what true love is. Two people who were gonna grow old together and still walk hand in hand.’’

Lavinia Gelineau bought a house not far from the cemetery and told many she would never be happy again. Her desk at work was covered with pictures of her husband, and she always wore a button with a photo of the young, smiling soldier on her chest.

The year after his death became an up-and-down struggle for the widow, her friends say. She frequently visited her in-laws in Vermont and turned into an outspoken critic of U.S. policy in Iraq, which has taken more than 1,500 U.S. lives to date.

’’She felt that the two of them were as one. She more than lost a partner when he died, she lost a part of herself,’’ said Andy Gibson, the Maine National Guard chaplain who met with the widow frequently after her young husband died.

Lavinia Gelineau’s mother-in-law, Victoria Chicoine, said she hopes the couple will be remembered for what everyone around them saw: an uncommon devotion.

’’I want them to be remembered as loving each other so much in life that they joined together in death,’’ she said, choking back tears. ’’It was a love everybody dreams of.’’

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