NYPD cop and girlfriend charged with murdering cop’s 8-year-old autistic son
On January 24, a veteran NYPD officer, Michael Valva, 40, and his girlfriend, Angela Pollina, 42, were both charged with murdering the officer’s eight-year-old autistic son. The boy, already suffering from head and facial injuries he had incurred a week earlier at the father’s home in Long Island, “was allegedly left in an unheated, unfinished garage overnight and froze to death.” According to Newser:
Valva called 911 the morning of Jan. 17 to report his son Thomas had fallen in the driveway and lost consciousness while waiting for the school bus, and Suffolk County officers responded to the Long Island home to find Valva performing CPR on the boy in the basement of the home. His body temperature was 76 degrees, and upon investigating, a police rep says, “We … determined that Thomas was never in the driveway that morning, and he suffered head and facial injuries that were not consistent with his father’s account.”
Thomas was transported to a local hospital where he was pronounced deceased. The medical examiner ruled the cause of death to be homicide – with a hypothermia being a major contributing factor.
NBC News reported that the outdoor temperatures had dipped to 19 degrees during the overnight hours young Thomas was banished to his father’s unheated, unfinished garage. “The medical examiner has ruled it a homicide with a major contributing factor of hypothermia,” Suffolk County Police Commissioner Geraldine Hart said. “We believe certainly that Thomas was kept in the garage overnight preceding his death.”
Hart also told the media that Valva maintained an extensive security system in his Long Island home in order to keep his and Pollina’s children in constant view. In that house of horrors, Valva and Pollina were able to keep Valva’s sons, ages 6, 10 and 8-year-old Thomas, and Pollina’s three daughters, 6 and 11-year-old twins, under constant surveillance.
But the NYPD were able to use the security footage from that system to prove that Valva’s surviving sons were punished with “food deprivation and exposure to extremely frigid temperatures,” according to Hart. “We are still investigating the extent of the abuse and if it extended to all of the children,” Hart said. ~ CNN
All of the other kids were removed from the home on January 17 when police responded to that bogus report of Thomas falling down in his father’s driveway.
Making this case even more tragic, Valva’s ex-wife has long complained that her ex and his fiancée were abusing the children. She has documented those allegations of abuse on her Twitter account and said that she has been trying to get someone to listen to her complaints for years.
Thomas’ mother, Justyna Zubko Valva, said that she begged a family court judge to remove their children from her ex’s custody or they were “going to die.”
“Every time I kept telling the judge, ‘if you’re not going to remove the children, they are going to die under his care and custody,'” said Zubko Valva to the station. “There was evidence, hard evidence. Reports filed. Children were telling me too about the abuse.” ~ ABC News
On Friday, Valva and Pollina pleaded not guilty to charges of Thomas’ second-degree murder.
Valva has been employed since 2005 as an NYPD transit officer. He has been suspended without pay pending the outcome of this case.
The couple’s case will be presented to the Grand Jury on January 29. If found guilty, they’ll each be looking at 25 years to life behind bars. For more on this tragic tale of child abuse and murder, see the video accompanying this article.
Written by: Richard Webster, Ace News Today / Follow Richard on Facebook and Twitter
