Officer Charged in Murder of Son, 8, Kept in Freezing Garage, Police Say (NYT)

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/nyregion/michael-valva-thomas-nypd.html

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.
By Rebecca Liebson
Jan. 24, 2020


Officer Michael Valva was arrested and charged on Friday with killing his 8-year-old son.

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.

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.”