Officer Charged in Murder of Son, 8, Kept in Freezing Garage, Police Say
“Get your hands off his mouth”: Audio was captured hours before the boy’s death at the hands of his N.Y.P.D. father, officials said.
The voices were captured by household surveillance equipment.
“Get your hand off his mouth,” a woman says. “There’s people everywhere.”
The woman, Angela Pollina, was talking to her fiancé, Michael Valva, a New York City police officer. The mouth she was urging him to remove his hand from belonged to his son, Thomas, an 8-year-old with autism, officials said.
Not long after the recording was made, the authorities said, Thomas Valva was dead. He had been kept overnight in the couple’s unheated Long Island garage as the temperature outside plunged to 19 degrees, the police said.
His body temperature was just 76 degrees when he was brought to the hospital, the police said.
On Friday, Officer Valva and Ms. Pollina were charged with second-degree murder in the boy’s death. Officer Valva, who joined the New York Police Department in 2005 and was most recently assigned to the transit bureau, was suspended after his arrest, the New York department said.
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Timothy D. Sini, the Suffolk County district attorney, described the killing as “one of the worst crimes I’ve ever seen.”
“The depravity of these defendants is shocking,” Mr. Sini said. “They caused the death of this little boy and then they watched him die.”
There had been warnings that Officer Valva, 40, and Ms. Pollina, 42, might be harming at least some of the six children living with them — his three sons and her three daughters — at their home in Center Moriches, N.Y.
For at least two years, Officer Valva’s estranged wife, Justyna Zubko-Valva, sought to sound the alarm about what she said was his abuse of their sons, according to court filings in their divorce.
Mr. Sini said on Friday that the county’s child welfare agency had also been contacted about the family. He declined to elaborate. The couple’s other children had been placed in a “safe environment” for the time being, Geraldine Hart, the Suffolk County police commissioner, said.
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Officer Valva and Ms. Pollina called the police to their home early on Jan. 17, officials said. Officer Valva was in the basement when the police arrived, and he appeared to be performing CPR on the boy.
He said that Thomas had fallen in the driveway while waiting for the school bus and had then lost consciousness, officials said.
Thomas was taken to Long Island Community Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, officials said. The county medical examiner ruled the death a homicide and found that hypothermia was a major contributing factor, officials said.
“Thomas Valva was subjected to freezing temperatures in the home’s unheated garage overnight when the outside temperature was 19 degrees,” Commissioner Hart said.
“We have determined Thomas was never in the driveway that morning, and he suffered head and facial injuries that were not consistent with the father’s account,” the chief added.
The police said they were working with the local school district, social services agencies, the F.B.I. and others to try to piece together what exactly had unfolded in the home over time.
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