NEW YORK – A former NYPD officer was convicted of murder for the death of his 8-year-old son, who was forced to sleep in the family’s frozen garage on Long Island in January 2020.
The jury found Michael Valva guilty after hours of deliberation on Friday. In addition to second degree murder, jurors had assessed charges including manslaughter and felony negligence in the case of Thomas Valva, who died after Suffolk County prosecutors alleged that his allegedly depraved father had exiled him to the garage. when temperatures dropped below 20 degrees.
Valva was found guilty of all the charges he faced. The sentence was set for 8 December.
According to prosecutors, Thomas Valva and his older brother Anthony spent 16 hours in the unheated garage one night when the outside temperature plummeted. Thomas’s body temperature was 76 degrees when he died.
The brothers, both with autism, were in that garage, he said, as punishment for constantly urinating and defecating in the house. The idea of putting the children there came from Valva’s then-girlfriend, Angela Polina, who supported the defense.
“Michael Valva took care of his children and didn’t want them to die,” said defense attorney Anthony Lapinta, who called Thomas’s death accidental.
Polina was also charged with murder in the case and has previously pleaded not guilty. Lapinta described her as a “demanding and controlling girlfriend who forced the boys to live away from home”.
In the days following Thomas’ death, investigators uncovered a series of disturbing allegations – repeated, extreme punishment, starvation, being locked up for hours in a freezing garage – at the hands of his father and then-girlfriend.
The strong sentence is followed by Thomas’s mother, as the boy’s death exposed serious alleged weaknesses within the family’s justice system that allowed for an alleged pattern of prolonged abuse that took the life of her son.
He did not attend the trial.
