Family Mourns Son of Romania : Memorial: More than 350 people gathered to remember a Fullerton man killed in his homeland while trying to help build a church.

The small construction business that John Antimie started in Fullerton after fleeing Romania a few years ago was swelling, picking up new contracts and employees rapidly.

Still, the restless 21-year-old owner had a grander goal, a “dream,” his family said: to return to Romania and build a church for his one-time townspeople, who were struggling with overcrowding in their two local sanctuaries and religious oppression by the government.

Antimie never made it. En route to see his girlfriend in Romania and bring $25,000 in church seed money last month, he was gunned down by military security forces in his violence-racked homeland, about 300 miles from what was to have been the site of the new place of worship, his family says.

And Wednesday night, more than 350 family members and friends from the Romanian community in Orange County said goodby to a young man who they said always seemed to know what he wanted.

“John was a very brave young man,” the Rev. Lazar Gog of the Emanuel Pentecostal Romanian Church told congregants who packed the Anaheim sanctuary.

“He was a man with a mission for his homeland, Romania, a man with many fulfillments in his adopted land, the United States,” Gog said. “He was on a special mission, a good mission.”

Antimie’s bullet-riddled body--he was hit eight times and the car he was driving had 400 holes in it, family members said--was buried over the weekend beside his mother in the Romanian town of Margina.

Local relatives, in contact with family members in Romania, made a point to use wordings at the Anaheim memorial service that were similar to those at the Romanian funeral Antimie received.

Antimie was one of 11 siblings in this country and among dozens of other family members who had emigrated to Southern California. Many of them, seemingly still stunned by his death, wept quietly as he was eulogized Wednesday.

“It’s a shock for us all,” said brother-in-law James Ovi of Riverside. “At this time--Christmas, New Year’s--he should have been home.”

Antimie came to Orange County four years ago with his family from Romania and quickly found work at $5 an hour with a local firm in construction, a trade that had become a tradition among several generations of the Antimie men.

But he soon grew restless and, within a few years, saved up several thousand dollars, enough to set up his own shop in construction and remodeling. He eventually did well enough to put down payments on two homes in Riverside and one in Buena Park for remodeling and resale.

“He saw that if (his former employers) could do it, he could do it,” Ovi recalled. “John was always very shrewd, very ambitious. When an idea came into his head, he did it.”

His father, too, recalled that John always stood out among the family, seeming to offer the best hope of success in their adopted land.

“He was a very special person, smarter than the other children,” Ion Antimie said through a translator at an interview in his Fullerton home. “He had very big visions, big dreams. He’d have been a millionaire in four or five years.”

Antimie found time for pastimes he had picked up in America--skiing and camping among them--along with old favorites such as tennis and soccer. But for the most part, family members said, his mind was on work.

“He was always very serious,” his younger brother, Dorel, recalled. “He used to tell us, ‘When we work, we should work; then we can play.’ He knew if he worked hard enough, he would succeed.”

He Had a Dream

Through his hard work, John Antimie had earned enough money to be able to take $25,000 to Romania in hope of helping build the church for his former countrymen, his family said. He set out with his older brother late last month, planning to see his girlfriend in Margina and perhaps bring her back to the United States.

But their plans changed when violence suddenly broke out in Romania with the overthrow of longtime dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu, and the two brothers made a side trip in West Germany for food and medical supplies for victims, relatives said.

The U.S. State Department has provided no account of Antimie’s death, but family members--in contact with relatives in Romania--said they believe the brothers were ambushed in their rental car by more than a dozen members of a security force.

The family believes the sight of his foreign car may have triggered hundreds of rounds of gunfire by Ceaucescu military forces who feared that outsiders might be bringing aid to the rebelling Romanians.

At Wednesday’s service, Pastor Gog said Antimie’s death serves as tragic testimony to the “lying, deception, murdering” of the Communist system in Romania and Eastern Europe.

But the victim’s father, for his part, said he has accepted the tragedy and seeks no action against those who may be responsible.

“This is the way God wants it,” Ion Antimie said. “I don’t understand it, but God must know what he’s doing.”